


Full Dark

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Armitage Hux Needs A Hug, Armitage Hux Smokes, Armitage Hux is Not Nice, Brendol Hux's A+ Parenting, Eventual Happy Ending, Horror, Idiots in Love, Inspired by Stephen King, M/M, Murder, Partners in Crime, Porn With Plot, Protective Ben Solo, Protective Kylo Ren, Romance, So much plot but also porn, Soft Ben Solo, ben solo becoming kylo ren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:35:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26144989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: It was hot that summer, the kind of hot that swamped your breath in your lungs and made sweat drip down your skin and sting in the little cuts that came from a farming life. It was the kind of hot that made crows fall down dead in the road with their wings splayed, the kind that sat over the hills and stilled the air so that the whole world held its breath and waited. Both Armitage and Brendol Hux soon learned what the world had been waiting for. To a lesser extent, their neighbors did too. The son knew more than the parents. It started with an offer.//Is Kansan farm crime noir ghost story a genre? Let's call it Midwestern Gothic. Kylux.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 45
Kudos: 90





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> TW for historical regressive politics, mostly from Brendol -- implicit societal homophobia/racism/sexism/antisemitism, mostly thoughts or verbal insults, one instance of homophobic physical attack.

It was hot that summer, the kind of hot that swamped your breath in your lungs and made sweat drip down your skin and sting in the little cuts that came from a farming life. Tiny abrasions from slipping on the dirt barn floor and grabbing the wall in a splintered spot, or from getting too much sun on the back of the neck, or just from the friction of wielding wood-handled tools and walking miles of fields. The raw spots on the back of the heel and the joints of the hand that were the price of work. It was the kind of hot that made crows fall down dead in the road with their wings splayed, the kind that sat over the hills and stilled the air so that the whole world held its breath and waited.

Both Armitage and Brendol Hux soon learned what the world had been waiting for. To a lesser extent, their neighbors did too. The son knew more than the parents. It started with an offer. The Huxes farm backed right up to a rail line, making their acreage more valuable than the money they ever managed to rake up from the soil. The 80 acres nearer the old dirt road that took them to town were in Brendol’s name, but the back 100 acres belonged in deed and spirit to his wife Maratelle. She had never taken to the farming life or to being a farmer’s wife, and when a man in a suit coat with a shiny and new _‘Republic Goods’_ stamped car offered her a large sum of cash for the property she fully intended to take it. Brendol, who at heart was a soldier and not a farmer, who in fact was a first-generation farmer and inept at it, and only farmed now from lack of a war, had not taken kindly to this turn of events.

“Did you even ask the lout what he wanted it for?” Brendol had barked at his wife. “Suppose it’s a hog butchery, you want to live downwind from that?”

“So sell the last eighty too,” Maratelle had said easily.

“And what will we do with money and no land?”

“We’ll move to the city.”

Brendol had turned the table over in his anger then, and Maratelle stormed from the house. Armitage had already gone out and sat smoking on the porch. He offered Maratelle one wordlessly. Brendol saw it from the window. Moving to the city -- Kansas City, Maratelle meant, and didn’t have to specify because since they’d moved here they’d never once been outside the Kansas state line -- was out of the question. Once, oh once Brendol’s family had lived in the city, not Kansas City but Chicago and before that the green jewel across the sea, and they’d had bits of land everywhere where they operated munitions factories. Until it came to light that Brendol Senior’s estate was inextricably tied to a political faction that had gone...out of fashion. Everything was taken in the name of the great American lives lost to Hux family weapons -- and none of those had been the Huxes’ bloody fault had they? But they had the money and so the suits came just like this mournful Republic Goods suit had found and bewitched his wife now, oh you always got served in the end -- those suits (the ones in Washington, not the ones on slips of paper in nice envelopes) had bankrupted Brendol Senior and threatened to lock him up like a god-damned animal. He dined on lead to forget it and left his son only this last patch of soil and no gold in the coffers. The next 100 acres over had not even belonged to Maratelle when they first moved here, but to a harlot who was nothing but trouble either.

In the mind of Brendol Hux there was no greater trouble than the communists (and by extension the lefties masquerading as patriots in every city hall from New York to California) and the social deviants (who were of course also communists, and some of them harlots). Brendol moved himself and Maratelle and took out loans to build his house and barn, which were ramshackle at best, and then the harlot next door, whose house was also ramshackle at best but who had no excuse for it like Brendol did, had caught his eye. Nine months later she was delivering a great deal more than a friendly basket of sweets to her neighbors. Her health had gone ill from the pregnancy. It’d been a hard one, Brendol supposed, but he hadn’t darkened her door to witness it, his interest snuffed out like a candle in a gale once her belly grew. She died a few days after handing over a squalling baby boy with orange fuzz on his scalp (to Maratelle, because Brendol had made no move to take him) and Brendol thought that was the end of things, until a lawyer showed up all the way from godfuckingdamn Kansas City with papers addressed not to Brendol Hux but to his wife. The commie harlot had left her 100 acres to Maratelle. Perhaps it was an apology. Maratelle certainly seemed to take it as one, shuffling around the house looking almost smug as she formula-fed their new whelp, and that pissed Brendol off more. If such a thing was going to happen at all, the deed should have been his by rights. Land was not a commodity fit to be traded between women’s hands, but there was nothing he could do about it. And _now_ , now look at the pile of shit served to him on a golden platter.

Kansas City was worse than hell. It was a haven of sin where nobody burned for theirs except the ones the other sinners turned on. Hell was perhaps Kansas City transported through time and space, only instead of being surrounded by good country there was brimstone and smoke beyond the brick buildings. Hell came to the farm for a visit that summer. Yes, because hell was a place where the men in suits stomped all over you and then told you you were a fascist for holding tradition in your heart, and your neighbors were duped by the suits and thought themselves so high and mighty for playing straight into the devil’s hands. Brendol Hux had no love for his neighbors and he knew they had none for him, though they always waved hello when he drove the old truck past their yard on his way home from town and Han always undercharged him for the use of their big and rumbling harvester. Han was okay, but the wife was a commie if there ever was one. She’d even kept her last name. And she was the worst sort, too, because the gossip in town was that Leia Organa’s pa (not the old farmer Bail who took her in, but the one who had planted her in her mum) had been the sort of man who had what Brendol termed the right ideas about things, and his daughter tried to make up for her father’s clarity by running full tilt toward the wrong ideas about things and declaring them proudly. This earned her the respect of the other sheep, but Brendol’s ire.

Brendol and Maratelle argued bitterly over the 100 acres at the start of that hot summer, and Armitage stood in the middle. He was partial to Maratelle, and it was only natural for children to be partial to the parent that didn’t hand out the beatings, but he also loved that land as much as his mother had before him. He walked it like she had when Brendol had noticed her all those years ago, traipsing along the babbling stream and through the copse of woods and occasionally all the way back to the train tracks with the same long-limbed stride. He was thin and pale like his mother, and sometimes when Armitage went for a walk Brendol would sit on the back porch and squint at him and in the flashes of his son’s frame through the foliage he thought he saw the dead woman. A ghost. Normally Brendol was incensed that his only child (one child; illegitimate, was stamped on his own assessment of his life like an ugly wine stain he couldn’t get out) resembled the mother more than himself, but in this case it was useful. He knew Armitage wanted Maratelle to keep the land.

Armitage Hux, who preferred to be called simply Hux, did want his dead mother’s land to stay untouched and safe within the ownership of the family, though not only for the reasons Brendol surmised. He did love it, in the way that only children who grow up within the fold of a particularly beautiful place can love a thing like soil, which never loves back. But what Hux loved most was his mother’s old house, which he kept in good repair himself. Not all by himself. Ben often helped.

Ben Solo, heir to the 400 acre Organa farm next door and only one of its many paid farmhands, had begun to wander across the fence onto the Hux homestead nine years ago exactly. Hux remembered because Ben had been exactly twenty, Hux twenty-five. They were easy numbers to remember. Twenty-nine and thirty-four less so, but time marches on. It might have been boredom that first prompted Ben to flop down next to Hux in the shade of the barn and get to talking, but Hux hoped it was more than that by now. Ben certainly said it was, but Hux knew better than most country-raised folk that words were always untrustworthy, and he suspected that words whispered against lips between kisses were even more treacherous.

The only thing Ben whispered now was a quiet grunt against Hux’s neck as he finished, thrusting his hips forward one final time to spear Hux completely. Having Ben over him like this always made him feel at once full and sheltered and laid bare and open. Hux grabbed a hold of Ben with one hand, gripping the solid muscle of his ass to hold him in place while he worked his own release free with his other hand. Once he’d managed it, wincing at his failure to catch it all in his palm, he tapped Ben once on the shoulder and Ben slid away to the side. They were both panting and sweat-soaked. It was too hot to be tussling like this -- what Ben called _making love_ , which Hux had rolled his eyes at the first time and then had to excuse himself to walk around the outside of the barn and kneel with his head between his knees, biting his own handkerchief to stifle a wail as he felt his chest might burst open. The quiet dark of the barn had overseen the first time, the loss of whatever purity there is within two boys who like boys but haven’t touched one. Not much, Hux thought, because a boy who likes boys is a dead boy no matter where he does or doesn’t stick his prick. It happened in the hayloft to be precise, which smelled a bit less like cows only because it smelled more like hay. The first time between them and the first time for both of them, more of a proximity issue for Hux than Ben. Ben could have had his pick of his parents’ farmhands if he were nicer to them. Hux was very glad he wasn’t. They hadn’t been prepared for it in any sense, had only pulled each other off fumblingly when they’d accidentally toppled over the razored edge of _want_ and found that breathless kisses were not enough to quell the heat in their blood. And Ben had called it making love. Hux called him an idiot, and then they did it again as often as possible. Even when it was hot enough to fry an egg on the hood of Ben’s car.

Ben’s fingers found his over the top of the sheets and Hux groaned. “Ben don’t, it’s a furnace in here.” They were in the bedroom with the windows open, but there wasn’t a breeze to cool the sweat beading up on their faces and chests and soaking into the bed below them. They’d fixed it up nice here, whitewashed the old walls and brought in new sheets that Hux purchased with his share of the farm’s earnings. They had a bench out front too, and Ben kept a bottle of whiskey on the kitchen counter. Ben’s hair was so damp with sweat he looked like he’d gelled it back too, just like Hux did with his own. As if flattening it to his skull would dull the vibrant red hue and make the sun change its mind about burning his white flesh.

“Just hold my hand,” Ben said plaintively. Hux intertwined his fingers loosely with Ben’s thicker ones. Everything about Ben was huge. He’d been built like an ox for as long as Hux had truly known him, and though Hux knew from living next door his whole life that Ben had been a gangly teen, the memory no longer meshed with here and now. It was more than farm work, which Hux did his share of and which had never bulked him up; Ben kept a set of free weights in his room at home. Hux visited the Organa household very occasionally and it always mortified him. It was so nice, and Ben even had his own battery-operated radio, and posters on his walls. Their oldest car (affectionately termed the Falcon) did not need a crank to start it like Brendol’s truck, and the Organas had indoor plumbing.

Ben was edging closer, the lazy hand-holding not enough just as Hux had known it wouldn’t be, and started placing sloppy open-mouthed kisses on Hux’s shoulder. Hux’s free hand twitched and he realized he still held a disgusting palmful of his own come. It was leaking between his fingers onto the sheet below and Hux gave up and smeared it there. They’d have to launder these before the next time anyway or they’d be crawling back into the reek of summer sex and sweat.

“How are things on the front lines?” Ben murmured against Hux’s skin. He was giving a puppy-face, which was not something that Hux thought he did on purpose. It was only the way he was shaped -- wide dark eyes and pouty lips. Pretty. But his nose was large and hawkish, his frame undeniably that of a man grown. A combination of features that Ben, in the depths of occasional self-deprecation, would moan ‘just didn’t work’ but did. Oh they worked _fine_ , if you asked Hux.

“An ungrateful child is a serpent’s tooth, but an ungrateful wife is ever so much sharper than that,” Hux intoned gravely.

Ben snorted, and Hux was unable to keep up the ruse. He smiled too. “Fight’s still on,” Ben said.

“Worse by the day. Maratelle suggested a divorce last night. You can imagine how well that went over.”

Ben set up, his eyebrows high on his forehead. “Do you think they’d go through with it?”

Hux bit his lip, thinking about it a bit harder than Ben had intended. “...No,” he said with finality. “No, I don’t think they ever would. They’re old fashioned. Stuck together to the bitter end.”

“What did she say?” Ben liked Maratelle a great deal better than Brendol, which if Hux was completely honest, was a sentiment he shared.

“That she would sell the land and Father could sell his eighty too. She thinks Republic Goods would buy it all to get the piece near the tracks, and I think she’s right about that. We could split the money and go our separate ways, that they could get a divorce since that’s what he really wants.”

Ben sucked in a breath and let it out in a whistle, able to guess exactly how well Brendol had liked being told by his wife what it was he really wanted. They lay quietly for a while, the room silent but their thoughts so loud that it was almost an audible drone. The land in question was, of course, where they currently hid away in every precious moment they stole for themselves. It was their refuge, their only privacy. A place where the world couldn’t touch them.

“If the land does sell…” Hux began.

“Do you think it will?” Ben asked quickly. He’d avoided this particular question until now because it upset him, and so he figured it would only upset Hux.

“I don’t know,” Hux said. “Honestly, I don’t. But if it does--”

“Live with me.” Ben interrupted again. Hux gave him a scowl, both for the rudeness and the suggestion itself.

“Where? I know your folks are...well...not like mine, but, _Ben_ ….”

Ben frowned. Han and Leia were both rather even-keeled and accepting of others. There was his uncle Luke, after all, who went to university and never married and never brought a girl around, and split an apartment in Omaha with a fellow schoolteacher called Wedge, who he also never brought around. Ben’s parents both adored Luke. But Hux was right; it was one thing to benevolently overlook the shadows where sin might live in the house of a relative hours away from you, and another to harbor that sin under your roof. The Solo-Organa clan was equally as ‘churched’ as the Huxes, who went approximately once a month (practically pious for working people). Ben had sat through the West Gate Baptist sermons beside his mother and listened to the holy word streaming righteously from the preacher’s mouth, _thou shalt not lay man with man no sir amen_ , and didn’t have the beginning of a guess as to what Leia made of it all.

“We’ll set off somewhere. I’ll fix cars and trucks or something for money. If I can keep the harvester running I reckon I can figure anything with an engine out. You’re good with books and letters, I bet you could get secretary work. We could head to the coast, maybe. California! You ever seen a palm tree?” Ben was getting himself excited in the boyish way he did, and Hux shook his head indulgently. “Me neither,” Ben grinned, “So that’s what we’ll do.”

Hux marveled at the world Ben lived in, one where a farmer could land an office job and two unrelated men in different fields living together wouldn’t invite a brick through the window, but he said nothing to dispel the fantasy. It was a comfortable one.

A bellow came out over the fields, Brendol’s voice calling. “Shit,” Hux hissed, jumping up as if he’d been electrocuted. He dressed quickly. Ben followed suit. Hux would leave through the front door and Ben would duck out the window, a well-practiced routine. Ben grabbed Hux’s shoulder to pull him into one last kiss as he buttoned his shirt.

Hux met Brendol at the edge of the 80 acres that belonged to him. Brendol didn’t take a step further, and hadn’t as long as Hux could remember. They sat there together in the hay-mow under the beating sun.

“Where the fuck you been?” Brendol grouched.

“After an hour of peace or so.” Hux answered honestly. He wasn’t wary today. It was hot enough to explain away his disheveled appearance completely.

Brendol sniffed angrily; the last hour had not been peaceful for him. “Your mother carries through with this fool plan of hers, there won’t be any fresh air to breathe out here or stream to wade in. There’ll be pig guts floating down it day and night. That what you want?” In the course of the argument thus far, Brendol’s idea of the probable pig butchery that would be built on the 100 acres had been cemented in his mind as fact, and neither Hux nor Maratelle knew enough about Republic Goods to disillusion him.

“Course not,” said Hux.

“The city….” Brendol muttered. Then, “You know she’s in town right this second talking to some lawyer from the company? Trying to take what’s ours away from us. _Bitch_. Most women are, you’ll find that out.” Hux mused over the fact that Brendol lived in another world too, just like Ben did, but it was a bitter world instead of a hopeful one, and also inexplicably one in which Hux stayed fourteen instead of thirty-four. That was lucky, of course. If Hux took a wife it’d be nothing but a cruelty to the poor woman, who he’d be destined to dissatisfy. And he didn’t need another pair of eyes watching him. Brendol continued on, “It’s an eradicable part of their natures. The question is what we’re going to do about it.”

Sitting in the hay-mow with his son, Brendol already knew what he was going to do about it. But he needed help. He had already considered going to the Law, feeling in his heart that any fair court should uphold a husband’s right to decide the use and purpose of his wife’s land. What held him back was not doubt -- he was certain that the commies had not yet usurped the great halls of Kansan justice -- it was hate. He wished his wife dead. In the oppressive heat of the summer Brendol had woken in the dark more than once and sat on the porch and listened to the night-sounds of the farm, and came to know that inside every man was a stranger. Inside Brendol, the stranger passed judgement on Maratelle, biblical judgement, the kind that ended in hellfire. And the stranger thought about the old well behind the cow barn, the one that Brendol had already set up stakes around to warn of the hazard within -- water too shallow and murky to drink or to save the legs of any unfortunate soul that fell in. Now it was just a question of bringing Armitage around to it, for what was 180 acres worth without someone to pass them on to?

“You mean besides shrieking at each other like barn owls,” Armitage said quietly, seeming vaguely amused, and Brendol wanted to knock him upside the head for it. The boy always got mouthy after he went off by himself or with the Solo boy too long, the two of them thick as thieves. Brendol refrained, forcing his hands to unball from the fists they’d become and lay flat on the faded thighs of his bluejeans again.

“You remember what I told you when that sonofabitch Dawson tried to Jew us down on the corn price last year?”

It hadn’t been last year, but Hux remembered. “Gotta take what you deserve, don’t settle.”

“Gotta take it,” Brendol nodded. “Even if someone gets hurt. Even if someone dies.” Brendol paused, gauging his son’s face.

Hux, still lost in the memory of an argument that had only been about _corn_ after all, for Christ’s sake, went white. “Father!”

“If she was gone everything would be the way it was,” Brendol said matter-of-factly, the thought having been turned over and over in his own mind until it seemed perfectly reasonable. “Think about it, boy. All the arguments would cease. I’ve offered her everything. I even told her she could go, talking about _di-vorce_. But she won’t! We could live here peacefully.”

Hux knew that Brendol hadn’t offered Maratelle anything at all. Leaving without any money from a land sale was akin to walking through a door labeled in brightly-painted block letters like a freshly-done store sign, reading ‘Destitution.’ But as much as it turned his stomach, Hux did think about it. God help him, he thought about it.

“I love her,” said Hux.

“I love her, too,” Brendol agreed, and it was not a lie. The hate he felt for Maratelle was greater than what anyone could feel if love were not the kernel at the center of it. And as willful and uppity as Maratelle was, she was warm-natured. Hot-blooded was perhaps more accurate, just like Brendol himself. She never turned Brendol away when he rolled toward her in bed and worked a hand beneath her nightshirt, although since the arguments about the 100 acres had begun their grapplings had become more and more like animals rutting. “We wouldn’t hurt her,” Brendol said decisively. “It’d be quick.”

“How far have you planned this out?” Hux asked, still white as a sheet.

Brendol walked him home and around the barn to look at the well, where Hux burst into bitter tears. “No,” he said, and fled.

That evening when Maratelle came home from town (driven most of the way by Han Solo who had also run an errand and seen her walking along the road just off Main Street), where she had in fact been talking to a legal representative from Republic Goods just as Brendol said, Hux got down on his knees on the bare wood floors of the house and begged her to lay off so they could just be a family again. The well hadn’t left his mind since Brendol showed it to him.

Maratelle bristled, argued with him, shouted at Brendol for bringing Hux into it as she rightly suspected he had in her absence, and then she lost her temper. She struck Hux backhanded across the mouth and told him to stop begging like a dog.

“Your father’s infected you with his greed,” she snarled. “The land’s mine to with as I wish, and I’m going to sell it. You two can sit here and cook your own meals and make your own beds. You can plow all day and read His everlasting book all night.” She looked at Hux coldly. “It’s done your father little good but you may get on better. Who knows?”

Hux looked up at her, wounded. His lip was split and bleeding from her ring, but his pride hurt worse. “Mum, that’s not fair.”

“I’m not your mum,” Maratelle said, and she looked at Hux as though he were in fact not her son but instead some presumptuous and unknown man who grabbed her arm. Hux winced at her words like she’d struck him again. “But if you have any love for her then you’ll trust her in giving me her property. You can go to the devil, both of you. As for me, I’m going to Kansas City. That's my idea of fair.”

Her idea of fair was the last word. She marched to the bedroom in her dainty town shoes and slammed the door. Hux still knelt on the floor, and when he turned to look at his father Brendol was delighted to see not just deep hurt on his face. There was also rage in Hux’s pale green eyes, the eyes he’d gotten from his harlot mother. The rage, Brendol would happily take the credit for. It was not the sort of raw and pure rage that doesn’t count the cost and runs out quickly. It was the anger of a man who knew the cost very well and found it acceptable. Inside Brendol, the stranger was grinning, sure that Maratelle’s frustrated slap had been her death warrant. The stranger could not know that it was not Maratelle’s red face playing through Hux’s mind now. It was Ben’s, smiling sweetly in the whitewashed room that held the bed where he would lay with Hux and beg _let me make love to you_ , he asked it each time with the same passion, as if it were new. As if Hux would ever say no.

Hux locked eyes with his father, and deliberately nodded his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Betraying my roots with this one. For the record I think Kansas City is lovely, and there are (and were!) plenty of queer leftists out in the country too. This is an indeterminate time period between 1900 and 1975, leaning earlier. Just think of this story as taking place in the same general setting and time as a classic Stephen Gammell scary story to tell in the dark. If you've seen or read 1922 by another Stephen (King) this will be familiar. Not exactly the same, because everything I write is gay and most of what I write has a 'happy' ending, but familiar. Personally, I'm excited about imagining the boys in suspenders.
> 
> [this is the playlist I listen to while writing this story](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Ghy50uSB5VANhMrv6g4xI?si=jsosdAAaT06dhZzh6NKWUg)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a good old fashioned wholesome murder in this chapter, I put a description in the end notes in case anyone needs a trigger warning.

“Do you think it’s true that those who die while in error go to hell?” Hux asked.

He and Ben were laying together in the shadow of the growing corn, their backs on solid black earth. Summer clouds sailed slowly above like white schooners, trailing shadows on the earth below in their wakes. The world had cooled finally with the appearance of a merciful breeze. “Did you go to church last Sunday?” Ben asked, amused.

“You know I didn’t. Too busy sinning,” Hux said, and he could tell that Ben remembered because Ben reached his arm over and brushed his knuckles along Hux’s bare forearm. It was the only touch they allowed themselves outside the haven of the house on the 100 acres now, though they’d been more reckless at first with the sweet urgency of new love. Everywhere else was too dangerous. Ben also hummed, and Hux knew without looking that Ben was biting his lip in the way he did when he was feeling lusty with no outlet.

“So you’re asking me if I believe in hell,” Ben said, after a forlorn sigh. He would have liked very much to roll over and pin Hux beneath him just as he’d done last Sunday morning.

“No, that’s not what I said,” Hux admonished. “Say someone died and they hadn’t...tied everything up.”

“Does anyone?”

“Okay, say maybe things were bad for them, and so they were bad because everything else was, and then they got killed.”

“Like in an accident?”

“Like...like murder.”

“Hmm,” Ben said. He liked a good theological question. “A murdered person doesn’t die in God’s time, they die in man’s. It doesn’t leave them any time to atone. It doesn’t seem fair to me if those errors count.” Then Ben sat up, the hazy glow of the day darkening for him just as it had when he first laid eyes on Hux that morning. “I know you said you don’t want to talk about it--”

“I don’t, Ben,” Hux sighed. Ben meant his split lip. Ben’s cheerful face had shifted to...well, to plain murder when he’d seen it.

“Someone ought to teach your father a lesson,” Ben growled.

“Yes, well, someone isn’t you,” Hux said, not for the first time. He hadn’t corrected Ben when he’d assumed Brendol was the cause behind the split lip, in case… Hux had to swallow down a sudden bout of either laughter or vomit, and he wasn’t sure which. “So you think every killer is heaven’s gate?”

Ben shoved him. “You meant to do that.”

“What?”

“Twist me all around.”

Hux smiled and closed his eyes against the perfection of the day. If hell was real, Brendol’s plan would send the both of them straight there. Of course, to hear the pastor tell it, Hux was already destined for the vast and flaming lake. He certainly didn’t repent, and couldn’t see that changing any time soon. So to preserve this heaven, this one here with Ben, what was Hux capable of? He didn’t want to consider such a thing. Hux slid his hand slowly over the rich earth until he met Ben’s arm, and instead of giving it a quick stroke and pulling away, he rested his fingertips there, feeling his own pulse in his ears.

  
  


It was Brendol who decided the date, halfway through July, and Hux who decided on the necessity of the wine. Maratelle sometimes took a glass of wine on summer nights, but seldom more than one. She was the sort of person who could never take two glasses without taking three and four and then the whole bottle and a second bottle if it was there. Hux bought three.

That night the three of them sat on the porch together, watching the sun dip below the fields and listening to the  _ reeee _ of the night-bugs. Brendol and Maratelle ate well at supper, but Hux hardly touched his. At least that was not suspicious; he’d never had a hearty appetite. If he’d been forced to take more than a few bites to keep up appearances he was sure he would’ve retched. He sat far apart enough from his parents on the porch to let Brendol take the lead. Brendol and Maratelle sat in their matching rockers. When Brendol reached over to refill Maratelle’s empty glass, she covered it with her hand.

“You don’t have to get me drunk to get what you want,” she said, not quietly enough for it to escape Hux’s ears. She was already tipsy.

“Have another glass anyway,” said Brendol. “We’ve got cause to celebrate.”

Maratelle looked at him warily, but uncovered her glass and let Brendol pour again. She sipped it, her brown eyes orange in the sunset like the eyes of an October jack-o-lantern.

“There will be no divorce,” said Brendol, and Maratelle’s eyebrows scrunched down and then crawled back up her forehead when he added, “because there will be no lawsuit. If Republic Goods pays us for my 80 as well as your 100, then our argument is over.”

Maratelle gaped at him. “Don’t fool with me, Brendol.”

“I’m not,” said the stranger inside Brendol. “Armitage and I have had many conversations about this--”

Maratelle leaned around him to look at Hux. “Armie!” She exclaimed. “This true?”

Hux forced himself to smile at her, hoping it was convincing. “Why not try Kansas City on for size? It’s not that far.”

“As I’ve told you both a thousand times,” Maratelle said firmly, and she was smiling now. It was sweet on her face, and wistful. The orange light of sunset deepened to an otherworldly purple-green and glowed in her wine glass. Hux thought that it made the three of them look like a trio of corpses, wandered out of their graves to sit on the porch as they’d done in life. No, not graves, he amended. Their  _ well _ . Maratelle was speaking again. “We can find a house on the edge of the city, where there’s still a field or two to look at. You two can sit around all day with no cows to milk and let me do all the work for once. I’ll find a little shop to work in. Ha!” She drained her glass and held it out. “Fill this up. If we’re celebrating, let’s celebrate! Armie,” she said again, and Hux fought to keep his face pleasant. “You convinced the old man of this?”

“He said it would be better to take a shot at being happy together there than miserable apart here.” Brendol said warmly.

“Hallelujah!” Maratelle crowed. “The boy shows sense and the man listens!” She drained her glass again and held it out. Brendol handed her the open bottle instead, which she accepted and chugged from deeply. Her lips and tongue were purple. She leaned in toward Brendol, grabbing his arm, and said, “You might just get that thing you like tonight. That  _ nasty  _ thing.”

“Jesus,” Hux complained from where he sat, and then felt terribly guilty. Whatever Maratelle meant, a nastier thing was going to happen tonight in the bed she and Brendol shared.

“Are you drinking over there?” Maratelle asked him. Hux shook his head, and Brendol uncorked the second bottle, pouring just a splash into two more glasses for Hux and himself. Hux moved over, sitting now in front of their rockers to accept his glass, but did not drink from it. Brendol handed over the new bottle to Maratelle, who had just finished the first. “Drink up,” Maratelle ordered, and Hux took an obliging sip. “Loosen your lips a bit. You never talk about yourself. Made time for any of the girls in town?” Before Hux could get a word in, Maratelle had launched into an off-key but word-for-word rendition of a raunchy barrelhouse ballad. Hux frowned when she got to the line  _ she was willin’ to help him stick it in _ , and Maratelle laughed uproariously at him, leaning forward in her rocker to cough into her skirt. “Lord above, men get hard in the hands of a stiff breeze then turn to puritans when a woman speaks her bloody mind.”

“Mum, please,” Hux objected.

Maratelle sat back up straight and tried to drink, slopping the bosom of her dress with wine. She laughed again, a low chuckle in her throat, and said. “If you’re good, Brendol, you can suck it out of the cloth later.” She looked back toward Hux and her mood turned belligerent. “No need to be so prissy. I’ve not seen you around here with any of the nice girls from town. Or what’s-her-name, the Organa’s farmhand. She’s got a pretty little figure. You’re getting old to be unmarried. Around here fourteen’s not too young. Ha! Around here, it’s a pity you don’t have a cousin. That’d make things easy.”

Above them the last of the light was fading from the sky, but there were no stars winking in the dark. Clouds had rolled in, not the perfect schooners of the day but an angry and vast wall between heaven and earth that might build into a storm. It was full dark.

Brendol was in good spirits too, though he hadn’t touched the splash of wine he’d poured for himself. He was uncorking the third bottle. The second was almost done. Maratelle tipped it up and then set it down. It fell over and drooled one last purple mark onto the faded wood of the porch. Brendol had it’s replacement ready. Maratelle held this last bottle up as if in a toast to her husband and said, “Hand on the plow all day, nose in the Holy Book all night. Unless he’s got something else in me.”

“ _ Mum! _ ” Hux gasped.

“ _ Mum _ ,” she mocked him right back. It had occurred to Brendol long before that his son had not seen Maratelle this far gone before, when she became truly belligerent. She had not been so freely indulged with drink since Hux was too small to properly remember, and the stranger inside Brendol was smiling. Maratelle tilted the bottle toward Hux, toasting him now, and said, “Here’s to Armitage Hux, and if there’s not a girl alive who knows the color of his cock, he’s a slowpoke.” Then her face turned mockingly grim, and she said, “Just make sure that if you take that pretty farmhand into the corn you’re a  _ no _ -poke.” She made her free hand into a fist and stuck up her middle finger at him, and then drew it in a circle around her lap. Left thigh, right thigh, up and around her navel. “Explore all you like and rub on her til your willy feels good and spits up, but don’t ram it home unless you’re locked in for life like your mum and dad. Stuff her cunt and you’ll swell her up like a dead deer. Someone ought to have told  _ him _ that.” Her speech completed, she tipped the bottle skyward.

Hux got up and left without a word. Brendol couldn’t blame him. It was a hard thing to have your mother talk to you like a whorehouse madam instructing a green customer. Yes, that was bad enough, but Armitage was also a skinny and pasty man, plainly without any luck in love, and that made it worse. Faintly, Brendol heard Armitage’s bedroom door close and then the distant sound of sobbing.

“You’ve hurt his feelings,” Brendol said, knowing that Maratelle was now past the point of remembering the words she’d heard and said this night. If she lived to see the dawn and woke under the immense weight of a hangover and Brendol told her what she’d just said to their son, she’d vehemently deny it. True to form, Maratelle scoffed at him.

She nearly finished the third bottle, a little over a glass still sloshing around the bottom of it, when she crumpled forward in her chair with a snore. Brendol removed the bottle from her hand and set it down, and then hooked his hands under her armpits and hauled her up. She protested, slurring, and Brendol told her sternly she was going to sleep in her bed and not out on the porch. He got her on their bed and took off her shoes, tossing them under it, and left her there to snore with one hand dangling off the mattress. Brendol retrieved the sharpest butcher knife from the kitchen.

Hux’s door had opened again while Brendol was in the bedroom, and Brendol found him standing in the entryway and looking out the screen door toward the Organas’. It was too far to see anything since the corn was high. Even the other family’s lights were lost in the distance, if they were on. When summer came in the good country, each farmhouse was a ship sailing a vast green ocean. In the full dark of this night, the Huxes’ ocean was nearly blue.

“She can’t say those things about you, my boy.” Brendol said, hoping to rile Hux up if it was possible, but when Hux turned around his face wasn’t sad or angry. It might have worried Brendol except for one thing: Hux still looked like a man who knew the cost.

“I don’t care what she said,” Hux muttered, though he did, just not in the way Brendol thought. He hoped the wine would make it easier for Maratelle. It certainly hadn’t for him, and he regretted seeing his mother like that just before the end. Then he saw the knife in his father's hand and cursed under his breath,  _ jesusfuck _ , “Can’t you use a pillow?”

“It would be too slow. Painful,” Brendol said, which was not true at all. “She’d struggle.” That was perhaps true, but perhaps not. The truth was that in Brendol’s daydreams it had always been the knife. Father and son stood in the light of the kerosene lamps -- their little farm had no generator, not like the Organas’ next door -- and looked at each other. There was a third presence there already, the ghost of the woman that yet lived in the next room. “It’ll be quick,” Brendol said, a final encouragement. He was wrong.

  
  


Brendol and Armitage Hux moved silently into the bedroom where Maratelle lay faintly snoring. They could have come in crashing cymbals and she’d have slept on through it. Hux moved into place next to her head, resting a trembling hand on her shoulder. They stood like physicians at the deathbed of a patient. Except that the lead doc doesn’t hold a butcher knife, and his assistant’s eyes are dry.

“Goodbye, Mum,” Hux said softly, and then held her shoulders down with both hands. She hardly stirred at that, but she did when Brendol swung a leg up and put his knee in her stomach. He quickly slashed through her throat. It was too shallow.

Maratelle grunted, a horrible sound echoing up out of her as if her throat were a miniature well. Blood seeped out of the red line on her neck. She began to thrash, and Hux shifted his weight to keep her chest down on the bed, his delicate hands splayed across her shoulders like large white spiders. She gurgled and then shrieked, a thin and sharp sound like a sliver of broken crystal. Hux’s face was going green, but his eyes were determined. Brendol had doubted his son would have the guts to see this through, and was pleasantly surprised that Hux had decided to. Her hands rose, coming up to her face and batting at the air, and Brendol should have had Hux hold her wrists down instead of her shoulders but it was too late for that. Brendol sliced at her again, cutting three of her fingers to the bone. The arc of the swing, offset by her struggling, tore open her face instead of her throat, carving it so deeply that she wore a skeleton grin from her mouth to her ear on one side. Blood flew all the way onto the wall.

“Goddamn it, finish this,” Hux hissed at him.

Brendol roared, a sound of animal fury. Maratelle had been trouble their whole marriage and she was trouble now, at the scene of their red-festooned divorce. He aimed again and drove the knife deep into the meat of her neck, making a thwack sound just as it did when she sank it into a cut of pork. When he pulled it out the arterial spray covered both Brendol and Hux from hairline to chest. The gristle in Maratelle’s throat was open now, and it pulsed sickeningly and then stopped. Brendol flipped the corner of the blanket over her and held it in place to try and minimize the blood flow. It soaked through quickly. Brendol climbed on top of her completely, waiting and counting. After thirty seconds she gave another heave, bowing her back so completely she almost threw him off. Hux released her as if she’d burnt him and backed away, resting his elbows on his knees and breathing hard. His breaths came out as half-sobs. Brendol kept counting. Maratelle didn’t move again by the minute-thirty mark, and he got up slowly.

“She never did anything easy,” Brendol said to console his son. “Now get yourself sorted and help me, or it’s the electric chair for the both of us.”

Hux stood up, and his eyes were glittering with something that Brendol couldn’t name, but all he said was a tired-sounding, “Watch your step. Don’t want to track it through the house.” The white blanket was blackish-purple now in the dimmed light where Brendol had wrapped it around her head and torso, oozing blood like a bloated sponge. Hux got the extra quilt from the closet and laid it out on the floor; Brendol had brought it here from Chicago, and now look at its fate. They maneuvered Maratelle together onto the quilt and wrapped her up in it.

“Hurry, before this starts to drip too,” Brendol said. “No, wait. We need a lamp.” It was full dark outside.

Hux went for one, and for a moment Brendol was afraid that he should have gone himself because skinny Armitage would go for the one that was easy to move on the hook in the kitchen, and from there he would see the screen door, and he would simply run out and into the corn and would not return. But return he did, the lamp tied onto his belt, bobbing shadows around the house. More blood was running out of the quilt and into black rivulets on the floor. If Brendol had known how much blood she’d have in her….

“Take her feet,” Brendol grunted. “Gotta do this part right. Don’t go fainting on me, I can’t carry her alone.”

“We shouldn’t have done it at all,” said Hux, thinking  _ we shouldn’t have done it this way _ , but he bent and did as he was told. They carried her out and down the front steps like they were moving a piece of furniture wrapped in a rug. They shuffled around the barn and the well came into view.

They put her down beside the wooden cap and removed it together from the yawning mouth of the earth. The well breathed out onto their faces, exhaling the stench of stagnant water and rotting weeds. A green-smell like the flooded basement where a creature with clawed hands waits under the creaking steps. It melded with the smell of iron in their nostrils. Hux gagged and suddenly puked up what little he’d eaten that night and the sip of wine his mother had goaded him into. It went into the well, and the small splash it made when it struck the sour water at the bottom was a sound that would be within hand’s reach in both their memories until their dying days. Hux groaned and wiped his mouth with his arm. The blood was going tacky on his face.

“That’s not a grave,” he said in a creaky voice when he had recovered. In the distance, the Organas’ dogs started to bark, a cacophony of dog-voices. “It’s no grave for a mother. This night will never end.” It was the desolate midnight moan of a man with the mark of the devil on his soul, but he was right. In all the important ways, Hux stayed in the full dark forever.

“Stop your bitching,” Brendol said, and together they picked up the bundle again. It twitched. They both froze, eyes wide with terror. “Imagination,” said Brendol.

“Nerves. Dead cords going stiff,” said Hux. And so they tupped her down the well. She made a much bigger splash than the vomit had, but there was also a squelchy thud that told them the water at the bottom was in fact too shallow to cover her. Hux laughed, and it was a high siren sound so close to utter insanity that it made gooseflesh pimple up on Brendol’s arms. He slapped his son as hard as he could.

“ _ Shut up _ . Your voice will carry, your-- you’ve raised those dogs again you worthless son of a whore.” The dogs barked once, twice, three times, and trailed off. Brendol and Armitage listened with their heads cocked toward the neighboring farm. Hux held a hand to his stinging face. Once silence reigned again, Brendol said, “Your mother ran away to Kansas City, or back to Chicago. Saint Louis. Left us cold and aren’t we sad, but in the meantime the farm doesn’t wait. And we’ll stay here.” Hux was nodding, looking off at the corn sea toward the Organas’ with an utterly lovesick expression on his face. A sickening thought occurred to Brendol then. He wasn’t worried about that girl farmhand that Maratelle had been harping about; she never paid Armitage any mind and he’d never seen Armitage look at her. But Brendol’s son and that Solo boy were thick as thieves. “Armitage,” Brendol said, calling Hux’s attention back to him. “If you should ever get the urge to  _ confess _ to Solo….”

An expression of horror stole over Hux’s face. “No,” he said at once.

“Good. I’m glad you think that right now, but if the urge should ever come on you one day, remember this: strong boy like that, and with those self-righteous folks of his, he’d beat you to a pulp and drag you down to the county jail himself. If he didn’t run from you.”

“Of course he would,” Hux muttered. “I know, Father. We need the milk buckets from the barn. I’ll get the soap going in the sink.” There was no need to heat it on the stove. Cold water for blood.

“Cap back on the well first,” said Brendol. They looked down into the well, and in the full dark all they could see was the pale blur of the quilt. They capped her off. They followed the same path back, scuffing their feet in the dirt to try and bury any blood that had dripped. It was hard to know. There were no stars to make it shine. They would perfect it in the morning.

Hux discovered something that night that most people never do: murder is a sin, and murder is also work. They scrubbed the porch until their backs were sore, then moved on to the hall, and finally the bedroom. The bedroom was the worst of all. Everytime he thought he was done Hux spied another dark droplet. They were finishing up just as dawn lighted the sky. They spread a clean sheet from the linen closet and bundled the ruined bedclothes into it. The mattress would also have to go.

“There’s an extra in the hay loft. Not so good, but it’ll do,” said Brendol, and Hux laughed again, and there was still something not-right about it, but it was not as terrifying as the last one. They carried out these last soiled items in the pink dawn light. Brendol thought that they could have left the cap off after all since they were opening it again now, but then shuddered and knew he couldn’t have. Not after that final twitch.

They opened the well as before, and looked down. This time they were not spared by the dark. Maratelle had landed sitting up with her legs crushed beneath her. The quilt and white blanket had come loose and were spread around her shoulders like a festive robe, as if she were dressed for a night on the town in some foreign place.

_ A night out, Brendol, it’s why I’m smiling. Grinning from ear to ear! And I’d never wear this shade of lipstick to church. No, this is the shade of lipstick a woman wears who wants to do that nasty thing to her man. Come on down! Don’t bother with a ladder, just jump! You did a nasty thing to me, now I’ve got one for you. _

“Father?” Hux asked.

Brendol tossed the linens down, hoping they would land on her face and shroud that awful smile, but the bundle floated into her lap instead. Hux carefully edged the mattress into place and dropped it. It landed on end in the murky water and then fell against the cobblestone wall, making a lean-to over her and hiding Maratelle at last. They lowered the cap down. The well would have to be filled in, but that was long overdue too. A dry well was dangerous.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, Hux is tipping over into the not-nice man we all know. But the REAL hard part is not getting caught after, right? Also it has occurred to me that I was partially inspired, too, by the trailer for The Devil All the Time on Netflix, which has a vibe that is like ridiculously appealing to me.
> 
> TW:  
> Murder committed w a butcher knife, victim sustains injuries before the killing blow. Disposal of body is detailed.


	3. Chapter 3

Brendol slept until late afternoon. Hux stayed up, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. He dreaded seeing Ben, something that had never been true before. He was certain that his horrible deed would be written on his face. Before he’d felt the gush of his mother’s lifeblood on his face, Hux had almost fooled himself into thinking that Ben -- sweet, stubborn Ben whose wickedness extended only to threats of vengeance he had never carried out and one drunken fistfight outside the bar in town -- could somehow love him afterward, because Hux had done it for him. Now he knew that made it worse.

Finally he went out into the corn, where he knew Ben would be waiting. Hux walked up and down the rows, listening to the swordlike leaves of the plants rattling in the breeze. In high summer corn almost seemed to talk. To whisper. Some people found it disquieting. Some said it was the sound of the stalks growing, which Hux doubted. He’d always found it a comfort.

Hux stilled, closing his eyes and turning his face up to the sky. Suddenly there was a noise beside him and then hands on his shoulders, whirling him around. Hux shouted, startled, and stared into Ben’s face. He watched as his nightmare came true and Ben’s playful grin dropped into shock and then horror. Then anger. Ben’s hands moved from Hux’s shoulders to his jaw, twisting his face around to look at it from different angles. Hux had bathed last night, painstakingly scrubbing himself with a bucket of cold water, but had he missed something? Was there a smear of red within his ear that would be his undoing?

“ _ Hux _ ,” Ben said. “This can’t keep happening.”

And that didn’t make sense. “What?” Ben’s thumb brushed over Hux’s left cheekbone and Hux winced, feeling for the first time the tender bruise his father’s slap had caused him. “Oh,” Hux breathed.

“I’ll kill him,” Ben growled. Hux stared at him, and then pulled Ben in by his collar to kiss him. Ben tried to keep talking between kisses, his big hands roaming Hux’s back, holding him tight. “He can’t...do this, won’t let him... _ hurt _ you.”

Hux pulled back. They were both flushed. They never took risks like this. Hux was already fucking it all up, behaving strangely. He tightened his grip, wrinkling Ben’s shirt, and swallowed roughly. He could taste Ben. He wanted more. “I’m not hurt,” he said, smiling, hoping it wasn’t ghastly like the smile Maratelle would wear now until it slid from her skull. “I’m not hurt, I promise. It was just...I think Mum’s left. Things were tense last night.”

“Left?”

Hux nodded, and then forced himself to pull his hands away from Ben’s clothes and stand separately. “She said she was going off to Kansas City and I think she’s done it. Father woke me up after. Ben, don’t be angry with him.” It was cruel to redirect Ben this way, but Hux knew it would work. That Ben would not think of Maratelle now.

“He can’t touch you like that. If he puts another fucking mark on you I’ll--”

“I know,” said Hux, and fought not to laugh. “I need to get back, he’ll be--” Hux almost said,  _ waking up _ , and caught himself at the last moment, “--wanting to eat.”

“Let me come with you.”

“Ben, no. I’ll be fine.” Hux offered him another shiny distraction. “I think I can sneak away tonight, with everything going on. Brendol’s bound to get blind drunk. Can you?”

Ben bit his plush lower lip, entranced at once by the prospect of spending an entire night by Hux’s side. “Yeah. Okay. I can do that.”

When Hux returned to the house, Brendol was seated at the table. “There you are, you fool boy.”

“I had to meet Ben. He’d think it was strange if I didn’t show.”

“You tell him what we talked about?”

“Yes,” Hux took the seat opposite his father.

“Good. You know not too long ago a man’s wife was his business, and his business was his own. There wasn’t a sheriff alive that would wander into a man’s room and go snooping around. Especially if he paid his taxes and went to church. Voted the Republican ticket. But I think those days are gone.”  _ The commies have us now _ . “Besides, even if they weren’t, there’s the 100 acres. Republic Goods wants those 100 acres for their goddamn hog butchery and Maratelle told them they’d get their way. They’ll come sniffing around for her, so a half-plan won’t work. You understand the danger?”

“Yes, Father.”

The cows were bellowing. Their morning milking was long overdue. Hux and Brendol took care of it silently and then put them out to pasture. The timing was wrong for that, too, but the beasts didn’t much care. So long as their teats weren’t aching they just accepted what they were given. Brendol thought that if Maratelle had been more like one of these cows, she’d still be alive.  _ Alive and nagging me for a washing machine like the neighbors have. That’d be fine. I’d probably get it for her once I worked up the cash. She could talk me around to anything but she shouldn’t have tried it with the land. Land is a man’s business and a wife who understands that is in no danger of bubbling her last breath through a cut in her neck _ . Really, it was all the harlot’s fault.

They couldn’t hide the truck; they needed it. So Maratelle had gone on foot, which meant she’d taken one valise. Brendol let Hux pack it with her essentials. The dresses she wore most often, her toiletries. He wore a pinched expression when selecting her underthings, and Brendol wondered whether he was remembering her vulgarity the night of her death. They added her good jewelry and the little framed picture of her parents she kept on the dresser. There was also her Bible there, but she’d never been one to read it, so they left it where it was.

“I’ve got it,” said Hux, taking the valise out to the hall.

“You’re sure?”

“I’ve got it,” Hux said again, colder. The screen door slammed. The stripped bed with its new mattress screamed murder, so Brendol set about dressing it.

The mattress in the well had shunted aside since the early dawn. Hux’s first thought was that Maratelle had pushed it aside, because she was still alive. She was breathing. Just as he got over his initial shock, a shock so great he was rather surprised it hadn’t driven him insane or killed him, he knew it wasn’t breathing at all because breathing doesn’t make a dress rise from bosom to hem and breathing doesn’t  _ wriggle _ . Her jaw moved. A rat emerged from her mouth, it’s tail appearing first as it backed out from where it had been feasting, and then its claws dug into her chin for purchase. The rat plopped onto his dead mother’s lap, and then a flood of it’s brethren poured from her dress. One had a fragment of pale pink fabric between its teeth, fabric that Hux recognized as from another pair of the panties he’d tossed in the valise he was carrying. Hux threw it down at the seething mass, and the rats avoided it nimbly enough, streaming into the round black hole just above the waterline at the bottom of the well. It was the opening of a pipe that had once supplied water from this well to the troughs in the barn. There were rat bites on Maratelle’s shredded cheeks, and one of her earlobes was gone.

“God, Mum I’m so sorry,” Hux whispered.

_ Apology not accepted, Armie, _ Maratelle’s glare seemed to say.  _ And when they find me like this with my face chewed up and the underwear beneath my dress ripped apart and they take you away, you’ll ride the lightning up at the state penitentiary for sure. They’ll fry you until your hair catches fire and you’ll see my face then, too. You’re not my son _ .

Hux lowered the well cap down. So the rats had gotten to her. They got to everyone in the end. When the heart stops the soul either leaves the body to fly or fall, or just winks out entirely, and there’s nothing left in the body to feel it when life begins to feed on death. Hux made it back to the house before he remembered the twitch. What if she’d been alive when they had thrown her down into the well? And supposing that, what if she had  _ still _ been alive and unable to move, paralyzed from the fall, when the rats came out of the pipe? What if she had felt the one that ventured into her conveniently-cut-open mouth and--

“ _ No _ ,” Hux said aloud.

“What’s that, boy?” Brendol asked from the sitting room. He was seated with the day’s paper.

“We’re going to get caught,” Hux said, telling Brendol what Maratelle had told him. “They’re going to hook me up in the electric chair and hold the switch down until my heart bursts.”

“Shut up. You just shut up about that. I’ve got a plan.”

“You said we wouldn’t hurt her and look at how that turned out.” Brendol glared at him, and Hux knew his father itched to hit him again for that, which would only complicate things further. It would only rile Ben up more. “I’m sorry. We’re in this together.”

Brendol’s glare dissipated. “If we keep our heads, we’ll be fine.”

“We fill in the well today?”

“Not yet.”

Hux licked his lips, bouncing on his heels once, trying not to snap at his father again. He’d be with Ben tonight and he couldn’t have more bruises. “That’s risky.”

“Yes,” Brendol agreed.

  
  


Ben was waiting on the porch when Hux arrived, having stolen away once Brendol’s breaths evened out in sleep. Brendol had not gotten drunk, and so Hux had waited carefully until he was absolutely sure. Once Hux was in his arms, Ben seemed to appraise him, looking closely at his face in the night. There were stars this time, and a fat full moon. Plenty of light to see each other.

“I want you so bad,” Ben said. They entered the house before they kissed, this time. Cautious. It was still too hot to have the windows closed, and so they propped them open and let the slight breeze blow the curtains in at them. Here in the cocoon they’d made for themselves, they abandoned their clothing to the floor, leaving it to wrinkle in their haste to get hands on bare flesh.

“Did you bring--”

“Yeah,” Ben said, kissing Hux deeply, pulling him in with an arm around his shoulders and pressing their chests together. Ben’s was obscene, to Hux’s mind. Everything about Ben was overly large and sculpted. Speaking of overly large, Ben’s cock was standing up and pushing heavy against Hux’s stomach, and his own responded. “You do me, tonight?” Ben asked. He pressed the bottle of oil he kept in his sock drawer into Hux’s hand.

“Okay. Yes.” Hux pushed Ben backward and Ben clambered into bed happily. Hux joined him, and slicked his fingers, reaching down between Ben’s spread legs as he leaned in for another hungry kiss. Ben moaned into his mouth when Hux pushed his fingers in, working them in and out with practiced efficiency to loosen Ben up. It wasn’t quite the ordeal that  _ Ben _ opening  _ him _ up was. Hux loved the sensation of taking Ben into him, being stretched almost to the point of pain, but especially if they planned to really get to rutting, it required all four of Ben’s thick fingers first and enough oil that it dripped down his thighs. They could get down to it faster with Hux on top, and counter to intuition fast was good when they planned to spend the night. It left time for another round, or for simply holding each other before oblivion took them.

“Come on,” Ben said. “I’m ready.”  He wasn’t being impatient. Not totally. Hux had gotten three fingers in to the knuckle and been able to twist them around and spread them slightly. Hux oiled up his cock and then reached to place the bottle on the floor, Ben whining with need, his hands pawing at Hux.

“You big slut,” Hux said affectionately, and sank in, Ben’s body clutching around him like he was trying to keep him there. He gave Ben a moment to adjust, and then when Ben jerked his hips, trying to fuck himself on Hux, Hux started to thrust. He kept it slow at first, teasing. Ben was stupidly easy to tease when he was like this. He was practically whimpering already. Hux re-positioned his hands on Ben’s shoulders, Ben’s legs wrapped around his waist. Hux could never enfold Ben like Ben did to him when their positions were reversed, but he could try, he could lean over and--

Hux looked at Ben writhing beneath his grip, his mouth lolling open and his eyes fluttering. He knew he hit that spot deep inside, the one that felt like you were shaking apart and coming back together, when Ben grunted low in his throat. Hux gasped and buried his face in Ben’s shoulder, his heart thudding hard in his chest. For only a moment after Ben made that sound, Hux had expected blood to well up in a line across his throat.

Ben made another noise, and Hux realized a moment later it was his name. “I’m fine,” he said. His movements had stopped. He resumed, cutting off Ben’s half-formed exclamation of concern and turning it back into one of pleasure. Ben’s hands were hot and solid on his shoulder blade, his hip. He rubbed his thumb in a small circle on Hux’s hip, trying to comfort him even as Hux pushed the problem away, even though Ben didn’t understand what was wrong.

“Oh god, oh god,” Ben was saying, and Hux thought,  _ if there is a god he’s turned his eyes away from me _ . He thought,  _ explore all you like and rub on that pretty farmhand til your willy feels good and spits up, but don’t ram it home unless you’re locked in for life like your mum and dad, except I am ramming it home because that’s what Ben is and he’s the only farmhand that ever was pretty to me and I can’t swell him up I can’t swell him up like a dead deer at least not by spitting up in him and I am locked in for life, I think I am, am I locked up for life too or will I ride the lightning? _

Ben cried out, shuddering and clenching, and Hux realized with a start that Ben was coming untouched. He fucked him through it as best he could, but he was going soft. He pulled out when there was no hope of continuing, his penis limp and his balls blue. Ben’s bliss didn’t last as long as Hux hoped; he was blinking up at Hux and looking confused, well aware that Hux hadn’t finished. They stared at each other. Hux took his hands off Ben’s shoulders and sat back, not-touching the way they did in public. Maintaining distance. Ben’s stomach was splattered white, his cock softening too, a little pearl of release still beaded up on the head. Hux wanted to lick him clean. He didn’t ever want to touch flesh again.

“Are you okay?” Ben asked, his voice low and soft as though he might spook Hux otherwise. Maybe he was right.

Hux couldn’t tell Ben a lie so soon after. Pulling out of Ben’s body was a loss, and when Ben left him empty it was a loss, little losses that someday would turn into the big one, and that day seemed closer and closer. The orgasm that might have sedated grief eluded him. God turned away when men made love. He in his infinite wisdom would not wander into this room and go snooping around. Ben was Hux’s business, and his business was his own, and so he simply crawled forward into Ben’s embrace and said, “I love you.”

  
  


Two days later a large cloud of dust came boiling down the road, heading out from town and toward the farm. The world that Maratelle had wanted to go back out into was paying them a visit. Hux had been mending the fence at the end of the driveway, and he returned to the porch now with his hammer tucked into his belt loop. Hux sat on the front steps. Brendol came out of the house.

They both recognized the vehicle pulling up: it was Rose Tico’s red delivery truck. She was the town’s blacksmith, and for a price she served as a taxi. It was this function she was fulfilling now. The truck pulled into the dooryard, putting Tarkin, the Huxes’ bad-tempered rooster, and his little harem of chickens to flight. Before Rose even cut the motor, a tall woman with perfectly coiffed silver hair got out of the passenger side. She had sharp eyes and wore a tailored suit with a gleaming silver chain hooked onto her shirt collar. She walked through the yard in her patent leather shoes, the heels making her even taller, and asked in an authoritative voice, “Brendol Hux?”

“At your service,” Brendol said, walking down the steps to meet her. “You are--?”

“Amilyn Holdo, attorney-at-law.” She put one manicured hand out. Brendol did not move to take it.

“Before I shake that, you’d better tell me whose lawyer you are,” said Brendol, inwardly beginning to worry. He’d never heard of such a thing as a woman lawyer before.

“I am currently detained by the Republic Goods company of Chicago, Omaha, and Des Moines.”

Brendol said, “In that case, honey, why don’t you go ahead and put that hand away?”

She did, with a lawyer’s smile. Brendol looked past her to Rose, who he also held no esteem for on the basis of both her sex and race. Hux didn’t care a lick about that himself; the same folks that railed against coloreds railed against queers too, and he himself just wanted to get on with living, so he figured it was the same for Rose. But he did retain a sort of grudging wariness of her because she’d  _ bitten _ him on his outstretched hand once when he’d handed over payment for iron roofing nails at her shop and had (unwisely, he now knew) smirked at the Kansas Democrats sign on her counter. Brendol was thinking,  _ we disposed of one meddling woman and now there are two more of them _ . Rose threw up the hood of her truck and started fiddling with something inside, a task she had to bring a stool out of the back for. She was whistling and sounded just as happy as a bird on a wire.

Amilyn Holdo’s eyes were already flicking around everywhere, taking everything in. “Perhaps we could talk inside, Mr. Hux? It’d be a little cooler.”

“It would, but I’d no more invite you inside than I’d shake your hand.” Brendol told her. “I imagine you’re out here on business.”

“I am.”

“Best make it quick. We’ve still got work to do.”

“Farming’s a hard life,” Holdo said, as if she knew. She was still smiling that thin lawyer’s smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

“Harder with a difficult wife. She sent you, I suppose, but I don’t know why. If it was the paperwork she could’ve had the sheriff come out and serve it on me.”

Now Holdo looked surprised. And suspicious. “Your wife didn’t send me, Mr. Hux. I’ve come out here looking for her.”

Brendol looked puzzled -- that was his cue in this little performance, after all, and he knew his lines. He knew his lines well. He chuckled humorlessly, because that came next in the stage directions. “Well that just proves it.”

“Proves what?”

“When I was a little boy back in the motherland, we had a neighbor. A nasty trip he was, mean old cuss named Jacob O’Malley, everybody called him Pop O’Malley….”

“Mr. Hux--”

“My father did business with him from time to time, and sometimes he took me with him, and every time we went to see that old man my mum told me to plug my ears because there wasn’t one thing that came out his mouth that wasn’t a cuss or something filthy.”

“I hardly see the relev--”

“So naturally I listened all the harder,” said Brendol, enjoying himself very much. “One of his favorite sayings was ‘Never mount a mare without a bridle, cause you can never tell which way a bitch will run.’”

“Am I supposed to understand that?” Holdo seemed to have moved through the five stages of grief and gone right back around to anger in the course of Brendol’s little story, though the change in emotion was only visible in her eyes and the set of the corners of her mouth.

“Which way do you suppose  _ my _ bitch ran?”

“Are you telling me that your wife is not here, Mr. Hux?”

“Absconded. Took French leave. Went for a midnight run. Most folks around here will say ‘she up and left him’ when the word gets around, and it will. Take your pick. I thought she would’ve gone straight to her new friends at Republic Goods and the next I’d hear from her would be a notice to get my things off the property she was selling.”

“Yes, as she means to do.”

“Has she signed it over yet? I guess I’ve got to go to the Law, if she has.”

“As a matter of fact, she hasn’t. But when she does, I advise you against the expense of legal action you will lose.” Holdo smiled again, and this time it wasn’t so neutral.

“I’d look in Chicago if I were you. Or Omaha.” Brendol smiled, echoing Holdo’s anger back at her. “Or maybe Saint Louis. She always wanted to go. But it sounds to me like she got as tired of you as she did of me and her own goddamn son. ‘A plague on both your houses.’ That’s Shakespeare, by the way.”

“Yes, I know. Pardon me, Mr. Hux, but this all seems very strange. Very strange, considering the amount of money my client is willing to pay for that property.”

“I agree, but I’m afraid I have an advantage here.”

“Which is?”

“I know her. I’m sure you and your client thought you had the deal all made, but Maratelle Hux….” Brendol whistled. “Let’s just say nailing her down to something is like trying to water your field by pissing on it.”

“Could I look in the house?” Holdo asked coldly.

Brendol laughed, and it wasn’t forced at all this time. This bitch had the gall. She didn’t want to go back empty-handed, of course. She’d ridden twenty minutes in Rose’s truck out here and had the same ride back to town and then probably the inside of a train car to look forward to, and when she got to the end of all that hard travelling she’d have bad news for her  _ client _ .

“I’ll ask you one back,” said Brendol. “Could you drop those fine tailored britches of yours so I could have a look?”

“I find that offensive.”

“Think of it as a parable. I assure you that if you did poke through my house -- my private property -- you’d not find my wife’s body in the closet or under the bed.”

“I never said--”

“Armitage,” Brendol looked at his son. “Tell this woman where your Mum is.”

“Packed and gone.”

Holdo was looking at Hux keenly now. “Is that the truth?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There’s more here than meets the eye,” said Holdo, tossing her head arrogantly.

“I see you wear no wedding ring,” Brendol told her, “But if you ever did it as long as I have you’d know that in families there always is.”

Amilyn Holdo’s smile was sharp enough to cut. “This isn’t finished. That land’s not yours. If you so much as drop a seed there, Mr. Hux, I’ll be seeing you in court.”

Brendol turned his back on her, going back to the house. He clapped Hux on his shoulder as he went by. “I’m sure you’ll hear from her when she gets low on cash.” What he wanted to say was,  _ No, that land’s not mine. But it’s not yours either. It’s just going to sit there like it always has, and that’s fine. It will be mine in seven years when I go to court and have her declared legally dead, and I’ll raze it down and plant there. I can wait. Seven years without smelling pigshit or seeing their intestines float down a stream gone red with blood? Those sound like an excellent seven years to me _ . “Have yourself a fine day,” Brendol called back as he opened the screen door. “And mind the sun going back. It gets pretty fierce on a summer afternoon, and it’ll be right in your face.”

When Amilyn Holdo and Rose Tico were nothing but another rooster tail of dust heading away, Hux called, “Now we fill in the well?”

“Not yet.”

“It won’t take much to get Dameron out here.” Hux warned. Poe Dameron was the county sheriff, and Brendol couldn’t turn him away if he wanted to have a look around.

“Aye, and Dameron isn’t stupid either. A well that’s just been in filled in might make him think. But one that’s still being filled in, and for good reason… Tomorrow.”

Hux raised an eyebrow, but didn’t ask. All day Brendol waited to see another streak of dust come boiling down the road, this time a county Ford with a star on the side, but it never did. If he was right, he thought he had at least a day. Maybe two. What did show up was the Solo boy, coming around to ask Hux to dinner with his folks as he did a few times a month.

Brendol watched them walk together up the road with deep misgivings. His son was keeping a terrible secret, and terrible secrets are heavy. Wanting to share them is the most natural thing in the world, and Armitage and Solo were just  _ thick as thieves _ ….

Brendol hoed in the garden until Armitage came back, just before moonrise. His head was down and his shoulders were slumped. Brendol hated to see him that way, more because it made his frame more pathetic than because it meant he was upset. But he was relieved to see him at all. If he’d shared their secret he wouldn’t have come back.

“You told it the way we decided?” Brendol asked.

“The way  _ you _ decided.” Hux had reiterated his assertion that Maratelle left in the dead of night as he and Ben stood together at the sink in the hall bathroom, washing up for supper. He’d added that now a city lawyer had come by, and had changed one crucial detail from before under Brendol’s direction.

“And he promised not to tell his folks?”

“Yes.”

“But he will?”

“Probably, yes,” Hux sighed. “Leia will see it in his face and get it out of him. Even if he doesn’t spill it to her, I think he’ll tell Dameron if he gets questioned.”

“Holdo will see that Dameron goes to the neighbors too, all right. She’ll bark at him until he does, cause her clients are barking at her. Round and round it goes, and where it stops nobody knows.”

Hux looked up at the moon, still fat and bright. Fat and pregnant. “Do you want a beer?” They each had one. Hux was thinking of the way Ben had looked at him while he scrubbed his thin arms and under his nails in the sink basin and laid false troubles on him. It was the look Ben gave him whenever they were relatively alone, a look that somehow held up all the world’s lust and love and agony at once, because Ben would have liked very much to come up behind Hux and hug his waist while Hux washed his hands, and maybe to nuzzle his face against the nape of Hux’s neck too, and he could do none of it.

Hux thought that there was dirt on his hands he couldn’t get off no matter how hard he scrubbed, and maybe it didn’t matter that Ben couldn’t see it. He was still filthy.


	4. Chapter 4

They had named all their cows after Greek goddesses, and in the end Elphis turned out to be a bad choice for the particular bessie they’d saddled with it. All the bad things had flown out when Pandora opened the box, all the evils of the world (most of whom now resided on a small farm in Kansas, Hux thought ruefully). Everything flew the coop except for Elphis, the goddess of hope. In that hot summer there wasn’t much hope for anyone, least of all their Elphis. She was old and no longer gave milk, and she was cranky. You couldn’t enter her stall without getting kicked, and a cow-kick smarts. It can break bone if it lands just right, or just wrong. They could have had her turned into meat, but she was like as not to be stringy, and Brendol balked at the cost of butchering her. They were no good at slaughtering much more than a chicken themselves, as was plainly evident to both of them by now. At least now her death would serve a more useful purpose than compost.

The day after Holdo’s visit, they put a rope halter on Elphis and led her around the barn and to the well-cap. Hux’s face soured. “I _smell_ her,” he said. Brendol didn’t reply.

Hux removed Elphis’s halter and they stood in front of the loose cow, on the other side of the well. Hux had dropped the harness to the ground and pulled his other tool from his back pocket -- Brendol’s revolver. Brendol shook the grain bowl in his hand. That coaxed Elphis onto the well cap, which cracked beneath her weight and bowed down...but held. The cow stood on it and looked at them with her big brown eyes, and they looked back.

“What now?” said Hux. Then the well cap broke in two with a brittle snap. Elphis disappeared, and then began to low in agony from below. There was the sound of one of her hooves drumming against the well’s rock sides.

They stepped forward. It didn’t matter if Han heard shots rolling across the fields today. That would fit the story. Hux looked into the well. His last look at his mother had been the worst thing he’d ever seen, a nightmare become reality, and the only consolation was that there could be nothing worse, and if there was then his mind would simply snap at the sight of it. He realized now he was wrong. There would always be worse, and his mind would not snap. It did not. That would have been a mercy.

Elphis had landed on top on Maratelle, as they’d known she would, but the grinning face was still perfectly visible, still tilted up to the sunlight. The rats might have gone streaming back into Rat Boulevard when Elphis fell, but they were already back and investigating. They crawled over Elphis as she heaved. One sat atop Maratelle’s head like an eldritch crown with a tuft of her hair in its front paws. Hux heard Brendol cough in horror beside him. Maratelle’s cheeks were completely shredded now, hanging down in chewed threads.

Elphis kicked again, and this time her hoof connected with what remained of Maratelle’s face. Everything beneath her nose shifted sideways with a snap, widening the awful grin to inhuman proportions. Hux aimed the revolver, steadied his hand, and shot. One shot was enough. They took the truck out to dig soil and stones from the far end of the lot and then returned, and began the work of shoveling it in.

“More dust on the road,” Hux said when half of Elphis was still visible. That might have been okay, if a corner of the blood-soaked mattress was not still visible too.

“Help me, come on,” Brendol snapped. Hux had stopped shoveling momentarily as he turned his eyes to the sheriff’s approach. Hux redoubled his efforts now. They had enough time. They probably had enough time.

  
  


Poe Dameron slammed his door with the shiny gold star on it shut, scaring off Tarkin and the chickens again. Hux and Brendol were seated on the porch with their shirts off, both grimy with sweat and dirt, and both with a bottle of beer. Poe took off his hat, combed his fingers back through his hair, and replaced it, then hitched up his belt and walked forward. He was alone. That was a good sign.

“Working hard this afternoon?” He asked.

“One of our cows fell down the old livestock well.” Hux told him.

“That so?”

“It is.”

“I guess you know why I’m here. I got a message to pass along from a real disgruntled bunch of folks. About your mother.”

Brendol cut in. “Would you take a beer, Sheriff?”

“That would be great. That would be just great. I don’t suppose I could use your privy first? Bit of a drive out here.”

“It’s around back,” Hux said. Poe went. If he was any good at his job, and he was, he’d pause on his way to peer in the windows.

When he came back, Hux had fetched him a bottle. Dameron’s badge gleamed in the sun. The gun on his hip was a big one. “Sweet-smelling privy. Always nice on a hot day.”

“Maratelle was consistent with quick-lime. I’ll keep up the practice if she stays away,” Brendol said. “Why don’t you come up on the porch? We’ll sit in the shade. I know you have questions you’ve got to ask.”

“I think I’ll stand. Stretch out a bit,” said Poe. He drank from his bottle and sighed. A cool beer was a godsend in the summer heat. Brendol remained seated. Poe Dameron was not a tall man, but he towered over both Brendol and Hux like this. Brendol tried not to let it bother him, but it did. The corners of his eyes tightened.

“I’m surprised Miss Holdo isn’t with you,” Brendol said.

Poe laughed, flashing his even teeth. “Oh, she wanted to come. Wanted me to get a warrant too, but I told her I didn’t need one.” He shrugged. His face was friendly, but he was prying. His eyes were prying.

Hux and Brendol had already agreed that if Poe Dameron seemed especially suspicious, they’d show him the well themselves. They couldn’t look as though they had anything to hide. “Holdo thinks we’ve got Mum tied up in the pantry? She’s mad.” Hux said briskly.

“Don’t know what she thinks, but I wouldn’t mind having a look around. Just because you wouldn’t let _her_ look. She’s fuming pretty hard about that.”

“I wouldn’t let John the Apostle in the house if he came out here on behalf of Republic Goods,” said Brendol, and Poe laughed again, and his eyes weren’t laughing. “You can look to your heart’s content.” Brendol stood, and it was a relief to him to look down at Poe instead of up.

“I appreciate that, I really do,” said Poe. “It makes my life easier.”

They walked around the house together, and Poe wasn’t shy about snooping. He opened cabinets and drawers in the kitchen, and even got on his hands and knees to look under the couch. He took a peek into Hux’s room and commented on it with a smile -- _Tidy_ . Then they arrived at the main attraction. There was no blood, and since days had passed to air it out, there was no smell of blood in Brendol and Maratelle’s bedroom. Poe walked in and opened the closet, and Hux almost expected him to say, _Where’s the quilt that used to be on the shelf up there?_ But of course he didn’t.

“Lots of duds,” he said instead.

“She liked clothes. She only took one valise. We have two, and there’s the other one still in the corner.”

Poe looked, counted the valise and the space where the second one should be with a click of his tongue and a finger-snap. “I see.”

“I’d have to say she only took the stuff she liked best, or what was more practical.” Brendol suggested.

“Nice room. Nice house. A woman would have to be crazy to leave a nice house like this bound for nothing,” Poe said, sounding very much like he didn’t think any of it, and leaving the closet now to look at the bed.

“She wanted to move to the city,” said Hux.

“Did she? That takes money.”

“She’s got those acres Holdo is after,” Brendol said.

“I suppose she does,” Poe murmured, getting down flat on the floor again to peer under the bed. “Pair of women’s shoes under here. Broke in. Good for walking. She leave barefoot?”

“She wore her canvas shoes,” Hux said, his voice colder. Those were the ones he had packed for her and tossed down the well.

Poe jumped up. “Another mystery solved.” They all walked back outside together, Poe automatically headed for his cruiser. Brendol almost called after him and asked if he wanted to see the well, when Poe turned and fixed Armitage with a frightening look. “I stopped at the Organas’,” he said.

Hux smiled at him without showing his teeth.

“I always do when I’m nearby. Leia’s a marvelous woman. And Ben’s a good kid. He spends a lot of time over here, doesn’t he? That’s what Leia said.”

Hux just kept smiling.

Poe forged on. “In fact, she said that you had told Ben something about your mother. I asked her what it was and she said I could ask Ben, so I did. I hope you don’t hold it against him.”

“No, sir.” Hux said.

“Good. When a man like me with a star on his chest asks someone what they know, they usually fess up. Anyway, Ben said there’d been a hell of a fight going on out here for the last month. And he said that when you came down on your dad’s side of things she slapped you up pretty good.”

“Yes, sir,” Hux said, well aware that his split lip was still a faint red line and that the bruise on his cheek was yellowing but not yet gone. He didn’t need to act unhappy, he _was_ unhappy, though it was all going according to Brendol’s plan. It had been painful, telling Ben another half-truth.

“She usually pull stunts like that?”

“No, sir. She had too much to drink.”

“Drunk?”

“Not quite,” Brendol said. “If she’d been all the way drunk she’d have slept all night instead of packing up and walking out.”

“You thought she’d come back once she sobered up.”

“I did. Looks like I thought wrong.” Brendol said gravely. “Someone must have come by and given her a ride. That’s my guess.”

Poe nodded. “You’ll hear of it when she contacts Holdo, I’m sure. If she means to stay away she’ll need funds. Did she have any money on her when she left?”

“Kept $200 in the box on the dresser to pay Han for the harvester when the time rolls around.”

“Saw that in his dooryard. Big old bastard. The money was gone out of the box?”

“She left twenty. Very generous of her. But twenty’s all Han will ever take for the use of his machine, so that’s all right.”

“Well, I’ve got a lot to tell Holdo, don’t I? She won’t like any of it.”

“We’d better get back to work. That well--”

“Didn’t have the good grace to die on her own,” Hux said quietly. Then looked at Poe as if surfacing from a dream and said, “The cow. I had to shoot her. We should have filled in the damn well three days ago. You can come and see the wages of laziness if you want. Still got the top of her head showing.”

“That’d be something to see, but I best get going. Holdo told me you were hiding something, and you were, weren’t you? If she asks me I’ll just tell her she was wrong. No reason for a company lawyer to know a mother’s gone and put hands on her family while in drink.” Poe’s eyes went hard then, and he looked like a man who could beat the life out of another without losing sleep over it so long as he thought he was in the right, and he said to Brendol. “I need to ask you one more thing, man to man.”

Hux could guess. _Is there more than one cow in that well?_

But that wasn’t it. “I put her name and description out. Protocol, you know. Supposing we find her -- and we might, if she doesn’t know how to hide out -- you want her brought back? We could do it.”

“I’d be much obliged,” said Brendol. “There’s the business of the acres, and I’d rather talk it over with her again. With a cooler head, if I get the chance.”

Poe nodded, and left.

When Brendol and Hux returned to the house, there was a large rat sitting on the kitchen counter and looking at them with its little eyes. It’s whiskers twitched.

“She sent it,” Hux said blandly. “The rats are hers.”

“No such thing. You stayed under the sun too long today.” Brendol answered, and chucked his beer bottle at the varmint. It scuttled down and into a gap in the baseboard untouched and the bottle shattered where it had been the second before. And then, because he hadn’t liked the words that Hux had said at all, or the way he’d said them, Brendol clapped him on his back. “We need to finish that well.”

It was sundown by the time the well was full with rocks piled at the top. Owls hooted in the distance. _No rats squirming to the surface,_ Brendol thought with satisfaction.

“You know Mum still wanted me saying my prayers?” said Hux.

Brendol was surprised. “No.”

“Even though she didn’t ever pray. Even after she stopped getting ready for bed with me because she said I was too old and it wasn’t right for her to see me without pants anymore, she’d still come in and ask if I’d prayed. And you know what? I didn’t even have to lie to her. I usually did. But I don’t think I can ever pray again.”

Brendol didn’t know what to say to that. He thought of God as a being much like himself, and surely God would not smite a man for dealing out His justice? They sat in silence while the owls hunted and Maratelle sat below with the lower part of her face swung out to the side.

The next day there was a covered casserole dish on the porch when they went out, with a note on top that said, _We are so sorry for your trouble and will help any way we can. Han says don’t worry about paying for the harvester this summer. Please if you hear from Maratelle let us know. Hux, if you stop by and see Ben there’s a blueberry cake for the both of you. -Leia_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things'll be picking up again soon, hold on to your butts.


	5. Chapter 5

It was a good summer for corn. Plenty of heat and sun, but still enough rain to keep the vegetable garden refreshed. There were evenings scored by thunder and lit up by white flashes of lighting, but not any crop-crippling wind. Han drove the harvester for both farms and it never broke down once. They paid off the year’s loan for the seed in full by October because corn prices had skyrocketed.

Amilyn Holdo came out twice more, and was starting to look harried by August. It was likely because her clients were badgering her and she was passing that along, but Brendol thought it was a woman’s nosiness too. Holdo was far too concerned with Maratelle’s wellbeing. Ha,  _ well _ -being indeed. Holdo asked a lot more questions that really weren’t questions at all. Did they think Maratelle had had an accident? She must have, didn’t they agree, or else she would have contacted Republic Goods to make a cash settlement on those 100 acres. Or did they think she’d met a bad actor on the road? And wouldn’t that be  _ convenient _ , for them?

The second time she showed up, toted along by Rose as before, she looked desperate and panicked as well as harried, and she came right out with it.

“She had an accident right here, didn’t she? Right here on this farm, and it’s why she hasn’t turned up alive or dead.” Holdo demanded, her face white with blotches of furious color high on her cheeks.

“Miss Holdo, are you asking me if I murdered my wife?” Brendol deadpanned. “If so, the answer is no.”

“You’d say so, wouldn’t you?” Holdo snapped at him.

“That’s your last question for us. Get out and don’t ever come back. Don’t mistake me for someone too chivalrous to hit a bitch intent on biting at my ankles. If you come back here I’ll take an axe-handle to you.”

“You’ll go to jail for assault.” To Amilyn Holdo’s credit, she did not look frightened. Only more determined.

“I’ve warned you off my property. That’s my right. Come back again and it’s a trespass, and I  _ will _ beat you.”

Holdo walked back to the truck, where Rose was also looking rather intent on biting should any of the Huxes’ insults be directed at her. Before Holdo got in she whirled around and pointed at Brendol.

“I think you killed her! You can’t hide it forever. The truth will come out.”

Hux, who had been pitching hay in the barn, came out then and held the pitchfork across his chest like a rifle. “ _ I _ think you better get out of here before you start bleeding.” He snarled. Holdo turned to look at him, and what she saw in his pale green eyes must have finally convinced her she was better off gone. “Don’t bring her back, Rose. No matter how much she offers you to cart her out here.” Hux spat before the truck door closed. Rose rolled her eyes at him, but nodded to herself. No amount of taxi money was worth being drawn into a fight.

By the time the truck disappeared Hux regretted the threat. He shouldn’t have done it, only Holdo had been yelling awful loud. Suppose Ben was walking through the corn then? He might have heard her.

  
  


September brought something new: Ben Solo entered the Huxes’ farmhouse for the first time. Oh, he’d been on the porch and in and around the barn, and near everywhere else on the property, but Hux had never invited him in and Brendol hadn’t either, for different reasons. But now Leia was set on Ben helping out in every way he could, and so she sent him over with ingredients for home-cooked meals once or twice a week. They only had one of Leia’s casseroles for comparison, but Ben seemed to be the better cook. He seasoned meat well and he cooked string-beans with little pearl onions. He even made desserts. The word for Ben was generous: of build and of heart.

Hux was so embarrassed he could barely speak the first time Ben had cooked in his kitchen under kerosene light and with no hot water available that wasn’t warmed on the stove. Ben knew it -- he always knew what Hux was thinking, it seemed, and was extra sweet to make up for it. He even stole a kiss on Hux’s cheek when Brendol went out to check the cows’ water for the night.

Brendol began to notice, with Ben hanging around in his periphery for extended periods of time, that Ben was exceedingly gentle with Armitage. This was worrying at first -- had the boy slipped and spilled his guts? But no, that wasn’t quite it. Brendol started to insist that he do the cleaning up, and he’d send the boys out on the porch together, and glance at them occasionally through the window or screen door. Sometimes they murmured to each other, leaning together to keep their voices low, and it seemed very much that they were keeping a secret. The secret in the well? Once, Brendol had seen Ben reach over and run his fingers over the back of Armitage’s hand. It was brief, and he almost wondered whether he’d seen it at all in the dying light of the evening. They had looked like an old married couple, sitting on the porch and looking out at the field, Ben’s hand on top of Armitage’s.

One hot Tuesday Ben came over earlier than usual. Brendol had come in for a cold glass of water from the kitchen pump, but Hux was still out in the fields. It might have been a mistake for Ben to show up early, except that it couldn’t be because Hux was helping Han with the harvester, riding along and jumping out whenever a particularly large stone needed to pried free from it’s metal teeth. Ben would know that’s where he was, and so the only explanation was that Ben was here for Brendol.

Brendol let him in and poured another glass of cold water, which Ben accepted gratefully. His face was grim, a foreign and unsettling look on him, and Brendol thought,  _ he knows. The boy’s told him _ . Hux had taken to carrying the old revolver after Elphis’s demise, but surely not out onto the harvester with Han. Was it in his room? Perhaps Brendol could excuse himself on some pretext and retrieve it.

“I’ve got something to ask you,” Ben said, laying his ingredients out on the table. Carrots, a cut of beef tied up in paper, yellow onion, a head of garlic, a small bundle of herbs.

“Just a moment, my boy, I think I left--”

“Is Hux sick?”

Brendol stopped short. “Sick? No. No, healthy as a horse. He’s always been frail of course, but...no.”

“He seems different. I have to call his name twice before he responds, sometimes. I can’t read him as well as I used to. He  _ broods _ .” Ben gave Brendol a wane smile. A worried one.

“Does he?” Brendol asked, too heartily.

“You haven’t seen it?”

Brendol had. “No, not at all.” He lit on an idea, an explanation. It was Maratelle’s idea and not his, but she was still hanging around after all. Her ghost was. “What looks like brooding to you is probably a case of lovesickness, and just plain anxiety. He was entangled with that little thing what works for your folks, the one that walks the fields with a stick. He talked to his mum about it the night before she went. I remember.”

Ben’s face went blank as though Brendol suggested that he go take a look at the cows in the barn because they’d all sprouted wings. “Rey?” He shook his head, frowning.

“That’s the one. Pretty little thing. That’s what set Maratelle off, more than the land. She’d have hit  _ me _ for that. But a mother doesn’t like to hear that her son’s made some poor girl scared that her monthlies are late, and no wedding first. Armitage wanted the house on the 100 acres for the baby, if there was one after all, and he laid that on his mum’s heart. Turned out to be nothing. The only time a woman wants to wake up smelling like zinc. Ha!”

Now Ben looked like he might faint dead away. “Oh,” said Ben. “O-okay.” He coughed. His voice had come out weak. Perhaps this was too far, thought Brendol. Ben was obviously sweet on that girl. If Ben asked the little tramp about it she’d deny it, especially if  _ she _ was sweet on  _ him _ . Then again, wouldn’t every young woman deny lifting her skirt in a field? It was her word against theirs, and if Ben confronted Hux, Hux would know to go along with it. Hux might be angry if Brendol’s lie cost him his only friendship, but he would go along with it to avoid the chair up at the state pen.

That night when Hux returned, Ben was obviously disquieted. It was a good thing Solo wasn’t his son, Brendol thought, even if the boy was better built. Ben didn’t have a single thought that didn’t show on his crooked features. They ate in relative silence, Ben so openly and disastrously morose that it filled the room like a cold flood. When they got up to go out onto the porch, Brendol said, “Just a minute, Armitage. Please.”

Once Ben had left, Hux turned to his father and hissed quietly. “What have you done?”

“Clear as crystal, isn’t he? But you could be doing a better job of hiding, too. You damn well should have been, if you didn’t want it to come to this. He was asking after you. I had to tell him something.”

“What have you  _ done? _ ”

Brendol told him. Hux went white in shock and then red in fury. “ _ No _ ,” he said, loud enough that Ben surely heard it through the screen door while he waited on the porch. So, Brendol raised his voice too.

“You don’t want your dirty laundry aired, you best clean it!”

“Everything  _ was _ clean,” Hux ground out through his teeth. Ben stepped off the porch, his boots scuffing on the steps, and walked away across the yard toward the fields. Hux turned, ready to follow, and Brendol grabbed his arm.

“You just let him stew in it. So what if he wanted that girl? It happens all the time. His parents will bring a new one in next year and he’ll fancy her instead.” Hux wrenched his arm free and Brendol bleated after him. “You just let it lie, you fool boy!”

Hux let the door slam behind him and tore out after Ben, into the unharvested west field. When he reached the stalks he was running so fast the leaves whipped his face. “ _ Ben! _ ” He called. “Ben, please. We need to talk.” He wandered the rows, calling out occasionally to no answer. Finally, his pulse thudding hard and his stomach sick, he hollered. “Ben it’s not true!”

“You didn’t think to lead with that?” Ben was seated in shadow a few rows over and ten feet ahead. Hux jogged there.

“I’m so sorry,” Hux said once he reached Ben’s curled up form. He had almost succeeded in making himself look small.

Ben looked up, his dark eyes angry in the starlight. “You better start fucking talking.”

Hux stared down at him, face twisting in pain. “I  _ can’t _ .”

“ _ Bullshit! _ Sit down.” Ben’s voice carried. He’d shouted it. He was good at shouting.

Hux did, sinking into place in front of Ben. He’d never seen him this angry. It made his features look somehow savage. Wolfish in the stars’ witchlight. “Everything I do is for us,” Hux said quietly. He would try not to use it as a club to beat Ben with. It mustn't turn into that.

“You can’t leave me in the dark like this. It’s not fair.”

“I know.”

“You tell me the truth or we’re done.” Ben’s eyes were shiny, his fists clenched. Hux nodded silently. “I know you’re not seeing Rey,” Ben breathed, speaking it like an invocation. Hux shook his head reassuringly. The idea of Hux with a woman was laughable. “But you’ve been acting wrong for a while now. Is there someone else?”

“No,” Hux said at once.

“Are you sick?”

_ Only in the head _ . “No.”

“What happened the night Maratelle left?”

Hux took a bracing breath, gathering the truth up. “Brendol told her we’d sell up after all and move to Kansas City.” Ben’s eyes widened. “She wanted to drink to celebrate. We all sat out on the porch drinking wine.”

“You never have wine on hand.”

“Because she drinks too much if we do. She did that night. Downed two bottles by herself and most of a third.”

“Before she left?” Ben’s face screwed up, rightly wondering how she’d ever swayed her way down the drive.

“She got rowdy. Said a lot of things...asking me if I had a girl in town, or was seeing a farmhand.” Hux ventured a soft smile. “I am, just not one I could tell her about. Brendol put her to bed.”

“You didn’t ask her not to sell?”

“No.”

“What’d she hit you for?”

“Brendol hit me. She did split my lip for asking her not to sell, earlier.”

Ben nodded slowly, taking that in. He bit his lower lip. “Why did you lie about it? Hux, why did you lie to me?”

_ It was Brendol’s idea _ would have been the truth, but Hux didn’t say it. He didn’t want to throw out an excuse. “Dameron came and talked to you,” Hux said. Ben nodded, looking sheepish. Hux had asked him not to spill. “The lawyer from that company is on the warpath. They want the acres and they can’t find Maratelle to sign them over. If they can pin her disappearance on us and get the land, they will.”

“Okay,” Ben said. He didn’t ask why Maratelle had left if she thought they were selling up, and he didn’t ask why Brendol had hit Hux. Ben was smart. If he wasn’t asking, it was because he didn’t want to know. Hux loved and hated him for it.

“Are we good, for now?” Hux asked.

“Yeah. We’re good,” said Ben, but he looked troubled.

  
  


Brendol woke to the sound of a cow lowing.  _ Overslept milking time _ , he thought, but that wasn’t right. The sun was still down. Sometime beyond midnight, clouds had rolled in, and the dark outside the window was moonless. And the sound was not the mild complaint of a cow needing to be milked, Brendol knew now that he was awake. It was a sound of agony. Almost as if one of the cows were giving birth, but they’d all calved in the spring.

Brendol got up and started out the door, and then stopped and returned to Armitage’s room for the revolver. It was on his side table, and Brendol picked it up as quietly as he could and then tiptoed to the door and started lacing on his boots. He could send Armitage instead, but after the debacle with the Solo boy ( _ thick as thieves they are thick as THIEVES _ ) he was loath to push his son into what might be a dangerous errand, in case his head wasn’t on right again yet. There were few wolves in Kansas, but Han had sent a note recently about a sighting of summer-sick foxes with foam in their mouths. A rabid critter in the barn could be the cause of those noises.

Once Brendol was outside the house, the pained lowing was very loud. And hollow, like an echo. Like a cow in the well. That thought chilled him and made him clutch the gun in his hand harder. He reached the barn doors and shouldered them open.There was a carbon lamp by the door. They didn’t use flame in the barn, especially in the summer when the hayloft was full and every corncrib stacked up. Brendol felt for the spark-button and pushed it. At first the brilliant blue-white light was too bright and he saw nothing. He could only hear the agonized cries and hoof-thuds as one of the cows tried to escape whatever was hurting her in her stall.The other cows were beginning to moo in sympathy, too. Brendol’s eyes adjusted and he could see the poor beast tossing her head from side to side and lurching back and forth in her stall, making the door rattle. Her eyes were wide and flat with terror and her mouth opened wide enough to show her green-yellow teeth when she bellowed. The other cows, as well, were working themselves up to panic.

Brendol trucked out to the stall -- third on the left -- with the revolver handy. He threw the door open for the poor beast and stepped aside for her to thunder past. It was Achelois -- the goddess meant to drive away pain, but the name rebounded on the poor animal again like a sick joke. This Achelois frothed in agony. Her back legs and underside were smeared with dark blood flecked out from her udder, and hanging there from one of her teats was a huge black rat. The weight of the pest stretched the teat until it was a white string of cartilage like bubblegum pulled between a child’s teeth.

_ Don’t do that, no one wants to see what you’re chewing _ , Brendol thought automatically, as though he were scolding the Armitage of years long gone instead of a hungry rat. He raised his gun and then lowered it. He wouldn’t hit the rat if he tried. It swung like a pendulum. The rat was like a twisted and mutant kitten with bloodstained milk in its whiskers. Free of her stall, Achelois reared and thrashed in full. The rat thumped to the floor. Brendol thought she’d simply dislodged it, but then he saw it trotting proudly away with the pink-and-red stub of the teat protruding from its mouth like a ghoulish cigar. The damned thing tore one of Achelois’s nipples right off. Blood pooled now beneath her udder and she slumped into the line of stall doors, looking at Brendol mournfully as if to say  _ all these years I gave milk and caused no trouble, unlike one bessie I could mention, and this is my thanks. You let this happen to me. _

Brendol thought to shoot at the rat now, but it was too far away, still trotting up the center aisle. The teat bobbed in its mouth and Brendol realized it was eating as it ran, chewing on its treat -- no doubt still warm and full of milk. He chased it, trying to stamp it out and failing. He was, after all, an aging man. And the rat was agile. Then he saw where it was headed -- the pipe in the barn’s corner, the pipe that led to the now filled-in livestock well. Rat Boulevard. Without this pipe, the rats would have been buried alive. Buried with  _ her _ . For an instant Brendol was sure the rat was too fat to fit, but as it jumped up into the pipe it seemed to liquify and elongate its body, and it disappeared seamlessly. He heard it’s little claws scraping on the metal, and when he leaned down to look he caught one glimpse of its scaly tail before it was gone in the dark.

Brendol’s heart was pounding. Achelois would not die of her wound, not likely, but the scene had been horrific. He leaned closer to the pipe, trying to see further than his eyes possibly could, and then was hit with a stench of putrefaction so strong that he fell back and sprayed vomit on the barn floor. He tried to clap a hand over his nose, as though that would drive the scent away, and only succeeded in puking on himself. He needed to scream, but a man can’t scream and retch at one time, and the retching was more urgent. He could see the other end of the pipe now in his mind, with Maratelle’s flesh dripping off her, teeming with maggots, her lopsided nightmare grin transforming into the one of bone that she would wear forever. Even when there was no more in his stomach to hack up, Brendol spat up long strings of acid-tasting bile.

He gagged and sobbed on the floor for what seemed a long time. He’d dropped the revolver, and it gleamed under the blue lights. When he could haul himself up without shaking, Brendol rose and used rags to mop up his sick. Vomit attracts creatures like little else, after all. Especially rats. When he was done he pushed the soiled rags as far as they would go into the pipe with the handle of a broom, and then followed them with heavy cotton clean ones.

“There,” he grunted. “Choke down there.”

Achelois had gone back into her stall, and that was a relief. He wouldn’t have to chase her through the fields with a harness. Brendol shut her stall door and petted her head. Farmers hold little romantic notions about animals, and he knew she was only a cow, but the way she looked at him almost made him sob again. It was trusting, trust he didn’t deserve. Achelois did die that year, but not of this wound. He thought he would lie awake for long hours and that he would dream of that proud rat trotting forth to its brethren with its gruesome prize, but his sleep was swift and dreamless when he returned to bed. It was the waking that was nightmarish.

When the sun streamed in and woke Brendol, his dead wife’s smell was thick on his body and pillow and sheets. He thrashed and fell from his bed, aware even as he did so that it was only a dream-smell, because it simply couldn’t be real. At the first opportunity, Brendol enlisted Hux to help him fill the barn-end of the pipe with cement. Let Maratelle’s little monsters suffocate in her grave.

Or so he had thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Womp-womp.


	6. Chapter 6

That hot summer, even stupid farmers prospered. The Organas, being far from stupid, prospered more than most. By September they added to their arsenal another barn and a shining red silo and a green truck with a push-button start, and a deep well that pumped more than six gallons a minute. They had already had indoor plumbing and shared it with their farmhands, so generous were they with their hot water. But they had noticed that less than half of the farmhands accepted the offer, most of them electing to drive home filthy, and they deduced it was from the desire not to track the field-soil into their house. In mid-September they added three shower-huts with modern toilets in them outside near the fields, built with corrugated steel roofs (two panels open to the air in the middle for natural ventilation) and wooden plank walls that would shield the bather from any viewer, excepting if one walked up to the third structure and laid flat on the ground to put an eye right up to the little hole that existed between two of the lower planks. The contraptions had swinging signs to indicate whether they were occupied, hand-painted by Ben. He was good at lettering. The door of the third one, placed 40 degrees toward the southeast from the Organas front door, was also incidentally invisible to their property, shielding the identity of the user.

Ben coaxed Hux into joining him on the fateful day of September 27th, lamenting that they’d never gotten the opportunity to shower together before and, piling on the melodrama, that he would like to before they were deceased. “No one’s even watching,” he had promised. So, they entered together and sudsed each other up, and Hux mostly ignored the prickling sense of shame that he felt after the miracle of having hot water at the turn of a handle left him open-mouthed. Ben had laughed at him, but it was a delighted laugh and not a mean one. When they were clean, they dried and redressed, but only partially. Hux pushed Ben to the dry portion of the floor and lapped at his cockhead until Ben was stiff, then swallowed him down. Ben moaned, and Hux hummed a warning, after which Ben clapped a hand over his own mouth. Hux was good at this, and Ben always wanted it when it was offered within the safety of their little house, but there was something especially titillating about getting it in a new location.

He wished Hux hadn’t let him get his pants up so far so that he could spread his thighs more and jerk his hips up, fucking himself into Hux’s mouth. Probably Hux had planned this exactly so that Ben could only take what was offered. Not that Hux ever left him wanting. Ben grunted into his palm, considering biting down on it. It might work better. He was already getting close, heat building in his groin like he’d swallowed a miniature sun that sat heavy between his hip bones. Hux swallowed him to the hilt, bobbing low, and how was it that he never choked? Not anymore anyway. Hux grazed Ben’s shaft just barely with his teeth on his way back up, and sucked hard once Ben was shallow enough in his throat that he physically could. Ben looked down at him, knowing that he must look a fool himself -- his mouth was open, lips soft, and his pupils were probably dreadfully wide -- but Hux was beautiful, all heat-flushed porcelain skin with faint summer freckles and that bright red hair. They locked eyes. Hux sucked on the head of his cock, so big he had to open his jaw wide to fit it alone, and then winked one green eye just as he pulled off to swirl his tongue around the slit. Ben gasped and came, splattering Hux’s face with his seed. Before he could make an apologetic joke about it --  _ shoot, we just got you clean _ \-- the door was violently rattling on its hinges, threatening to fly off them. Ben’s first thought was that a sudden storm had come up. Then Ben registered the yelling.

As the summer trended toward fall, though the heat held on to the last, Brendol Hux dwelled on the brief caress he’d witnessed -- that he’d thought he witnessed -- between his son and Ben. His addled brain cycled between the rats, surely not real ones because he’d plugged up their pipe, but shadow-rats with beady little eyes looking at him from corners, and the stench of Maratelle in the house, a ghost-stench and not a real one, and the brief touch of Ben’s hand on Hux’s in the twilight. If the other horrors were false, that one was real. He was almost sure of it. So he kept thinking, and the more he replayed that night back in his mind, the one when Hux had bolted after Ben, the more he was convinced that he hadn’t imagined that sly touch at all. And once he accepted that he’d seen what he’d seen, which was his son and the neighbor boy sitting together ( _like an old married couple_ _how long how long_ ), like each of them knew the place the other took without looking, locating each other with another sense…. Well...then Brendol kept watching.

Once you were looking for it, it was hard not to notice the careful distance they kept from each other, and the incongruous intensity with which they met each other’s eyes. And oh, that was perfect.  _ Perfect! _ How terribly fitting. Brendol had watered his soil with blood to stave off the big-city communists as they reached for everything that was his, looking to rip away what little earthly wealth he could leave his only son, and all along sin had festered at his own table, concealed from him. The boy knew too much, he knew everything. Brendol had drawn him in and not known that they were truly enemies. If they were not united, then Armitage was an unacceptable risk. Judas Iscariot made flesh again (whether Judas was Armitage or Ben fluctuated by the hour, and sometimes he was both, their features and voices melded together into one malicious entity). But Brendol had to be sure. If his son had truly printed his name in the devil’s book, Brendol would put him to rest just like his mother.

It wasn’t so hard to believe that a boy might take off too after his mum left, was it? Sometimes the first break in a family burned through the remaining ties like acid. And like with the well, the stranger inside had already whispered a new suggestion: Elphis’s stall was empty and unlikely to be refilled. Brendol hadn’t begun digging yet because they both did the milking (all the girls except for poor Achelois, who gave no more milk) and there was always a chance that Hux would glance into the stall and start to wonder. Part of him, the part that remembered the rat, was uneasy about putting Hux in the barn and wanted to shunt him off somewhere further away. Further than the well. But no other likely solutions presented themselves, and he’d already capped off the pipe after all, and Brendol had to be oh so careful with this. Twice as careful as he was with Maratelle. No blood, no knife, no leaving the body uncovered to rot and attract ra-- vermin. He had already taken one step, which was selecting an old leather belt for a garrote. He’d bury it with the body when he was done. He'd ask his son for help in the barn when the time came, so that he would not have to move the body far. But Armitage was his only blood on this earth, his only child, and  _ he had to be sure _ . No need to rip the boy’s eyes out to spite his face, unless they really did cause him to sin. Then rip away, urged the stranger.

What Brendol hadn’t counted on was the effect that irrefutable evidence would have on him. It was one thing to suspect that among your only son’s many defects was this final, fatal one. It was another to follow him as he wound through the field to the edge of the neighbor’s property, Sodom itself, and watch as he entered one of the strange little structures built there and not alone, oh no, and to creep closer and get down on your belly in the grass and look through the wall with the plants whispering around you and  _ see _ . And what Brendol saw was that Armitage’s objections to the last few sentiments that Maratelle ever uttered had been a smokescreen. He was no green customer needing instruction from the whorehouse madam, he was the filthiest slag of the lot. The godfuckingdamn whore of Babylon, made from harlot’s blood and grown like a tumor inside a uterus not pledged to any man, and then handed off to another bitch whore to raise, and Brendol had been blind to it all. Deceived. Careful was no longer possible, because no amount of careful would get the both of them, and leaving Solo unhurt after he’d seen the sonofabitch defiling his only legacy didn’t sit right in Brendol’s soul. So he pounded on the door.

It was Solo that opened it, with Hux tugging pale-faced at his shoulder. Brendol stopped shouting, having never realized he’d started. Hux had wiped at his face but he’d done a rush job of it and a smear of pearlescent white still lingered on one cheek.

“What do you want?” Ben growled at him, and the insolence of it all was too much. Brendol punched him. Ben went down, his huge nose spraying blood, and Hux wailed. But he wouldn’t be worried about Ben for long, the stranger promised. Brendol grabbed his son by his shirt collar and twisted it, cutting some of his air off, not all of it.  _ If only it were that easy _ . He dragged him out of the shadow of the shower-hut and into the green of the Organas’ front lawn, where he threw him down and kicked him.

Hux coughed and curled in on himself, looking fragile, looking long-limbed and pale and thin and  _ fragile _ , and Brendol was going to kill him right here if he could and screw what came next. The revolver was in Hux’s belt. Brendol went for it.

“No,” Hux gasped, fighting him, trying to grab his hands. Brendol won out. He twisted the fingers of Hux’s left hand until they snapped like dry twigs and pulled the revolver free, and he cocked it and pointed it down at his son, standing up over him. The sun beat down on them with all it’s worth, trying to get in one last hurrah before the autumn and why not today? What day is better for relentless sun than one in which there would be blood to light up in vivid color?

There were other voices, the sound of a door slamming, figures approaching in the periphery. Leia and Han, and why not? Dameron too. He did say he visited when he could. Their faces were masks of shock. Poe had a hand on the gun in his holster, the other up with its palm out, a warning.

“This is my business!” Brendol shouted at them. He looked back down at Hux, who stared up at the black hole in the barrel of the gun like it was all he saw in the whole world, like it was big as a pipe. Big as Rat Boulevard. “Sleeping under my roof, eating my food, and all this time sneaking around debauching yourself. You let a man lay you down and use you like a bitch and you go just as two-faced as one,” Brendol growled at him. “You want to suck root, you can die with that slop on you.”

Then Brendol was hit by a truck, or so he thought until he landed and heard Leia yell, “Ben!” And then he was being pummeled, Ben’s face twisted in fury, blocking the sky. He’d dropped the gun.

Hux stared up at the bright reverse-eye above, white inside blue, and then rolled onto his side with a weak groan. His ribs hurt. He’d been unable to think anything with the revolver pointed at him besides  _ please no don’t open my skull on the grass because Ben will see and he won’t forget just like I can’t forget Mum I don’t want him to see me like that please _ and then Brendol had been toppled over and out of sight and his father’s words had sunk in, and he thought numbly  _ there’s still come on my face _ and tried to lift his hand to wipe himself clean. The agony of his broken fingers stopped him. There was still shouting happening but he didn’t think it concerned him, it concerned Brendol and whatever had-- but what else? Ben.

Hux forced himself to turn over and get up at least to his elbows. Ben was being pulled up and off of Brendol with much effort by both Poe and Han. Their success was short-lived. Ben lashed out at Poe, swinging at the side of his head and putting him down in one hit, flat on the ground with his badge winking yellow in the sun. Leia screamed at Ben like a hurt cat, like Maratelle’s final crystal-shard shriek. Brendol was a bloodied heap on the grass and Hux couldn’t tell whether or not he still breathed.

The answer was yes -- Brendol sat up, roaring up at Ben. “ _ You! _ You put hands on my boy and made him filthy! He’s got that harlot’s blood...he’s weak to suggestion and you saw it didn’t you? Thought you’d shove on in and paint the walls? Dirty fucking  _ cocksuckers _ .”

“ _ We love each other! _ ” Ben screamed at Brendol or everyone or perhaps just at Han who was still trying to get him under control, using his best ear-splitting voice and looking anything but loving in that moment. His face was red with blood both below and above the surface of his skin and he had bared his teeth as if he meant to use them to bite. Both the delivery and the content, Hux knew, was a loonlike cry to anyone who had a better handle on their evil natures than he and Ben did. Perhaps it would have garnered sympathy if they’d been caught exchanging poetry or sharing a chaste kiss under a flowering arbor (they had attempted poetry long ago and Ben was so embarrassed by his he’d ripped it up rather than share it, a lasting sore point). With Ben’s come drying on Hux’s face, his declaration was so absurd as to bypass humor and dive straight into abject misery.

Han yelled now too, going red in the face from the strain of holding Ben back. “Leia? Leia!” He jerked his chin pointedly at the gun in the grass, and Leia went for it. It had dropped a foot away from Hux’s head and if it had discharged it might have sent him straight to wherever souls went, or winked him right out. But it had not. Leia picked it up, standing in the grass in her house shoes and her blue button-down dress with her hair braided up. Han wrestled Ben further away, pulling him back. Hux looked blearily up at Ben’s mother and thought that she was going to kill him and that she shouldn’t, because Ben might not ever forgive her. Leia drew her handkerchief out of her dress’s right pocket and leaned down (a short distance, she was a small woman) to wipe Hux’s face clean. A kindness that dumbfounded him. “Any time would be great!” Yelled Han, and Leia stepped forward, rolling the cylinder out to check it and then snapping it back into place and training the gun on Brendol.

“You’re going to get up, and you’re going to walk back to your own house, and you’re not coming back,” she ordered, the steel in her voice and lead under her trigger finger offering no room for argument.

Brendol struggled to rise. His face was swelling, his left ear boxed and his cheek split open. “I’m taking what’s mine,” he hissed, meaning Hux, and Leia’s expression hardened further. The commie bitch would ruin everything. If Hux disappeared after this little show the Organas would go crying about it to anyone who would listen -- the cop on their lawn, when he woke up -- and then probably whoever came poking around next would tear up the barn floor and the well too and they’d know. There was no plan now. He could only leave. Oh, but Hux would come back. Even the high and mighty Organas wouldn’t harbor a faggot long, and where else could Hux go with no money? He’d be back.  Leia didn’t repeat herself, she simply gave Brendol a sharp look, and he slunk away. She kept the revolver trained on him til he was out of sight. “Everyone inside,” she said tiredly. “Han, get Poe. Ben, you know what to do.”

Ben scooped Hux up as gently as he was able. “I can walk,” Hux objected. “It’s just my fingers. Two, I think.” But Ben only shook his head and carried him, and Hux was made to suffer through being prodded and iced and checked on, and installed on one of the Organas' couches like an invalid. It was navy blue with little pink flowers on it. Poe was on the other, plain green. There were ceramic plates painted with chickens on the wall. Han went out back and then came in and their dogs scrambled in around him, four of varying size and shape.

“Han! Dogs!” Leia called from the kitchen. Then, more quietly to Ben, “No sir, you’re staying put.”

“I know!” Han yelled back.

“Hey Beebee,” Poe said. Awake again finally. He groggily reached down to let the little corgi he had addressed lick his hand. He looked up at where Han was trying to wrestle a dog as tall as his waist with hair down to the floor back outside. “Ben has quite the arm.”

“Please don’t sue us,” Han grunted, and finally pushed the dog out and shut the door before it could mount a counteroffensive. It howled mournfully. “One down.”

Poe stuck around for a couple hours, holding a bag of ice to his head, and then departed after Leia fussed over him an additional ten minutes by the door. Then Hux was alone in the living room. Well, mostly alone. Beebee hadn’t been banished with the others (“He’s more polite,” Han explained) and now sat panting up at Hux.

Leia came in eventually and set Hux’s fingers. It was indeed two that were broken. Hux guessed that Ben had been confined to the kitchen thus far, but when Leia snapped Hux’s bones back in place, Ben came running at the sound Hux made. He’d been cleaned up in the meantime, Hux saw. The dark wine-gush of his nosebleed no longer stained his face, and he’d traded his shirt out for a clean one.  _ Cold water for blood, did you know that, Ben? _ But perhaps Leia or Han did the washing.

“I’m fine,” Hux told him unconvincingly.

Leia tied wooden dowels between his fingers with twine, securing them together into one painful but sturdy mass. “That’ll have to do until we can get you to a doctor.” Ben was approaching the couch, and Leia asked him to go and chop a cord of wood.

Ben spluttered angrily. “A whole cord? It’s summer. We have wood! Mom--”

“Now,” Leia said calmly. When Ben had gone, she left too. Perhaps returned to the kitchen. There was no sound of pots or pans rattling, only the muted tap of a short glass on the table and the glug of liquid into it. Hux closed his eyes.

When he woke it was dark out, full dark. But he wasn’t alone. The four dogs slept on appropriately-sized dog beds on the floor. Han sat on the other couch, reading by the light of an electric lamp. Hux sat up and pressed a hand to his ribs. Leia had gently run her fingers over his ribcage earlier and professed it only a bruise, but it hurt.

“Thought the kid was gonna hit  _ me _ when I wouldn’t let him sleep out here with you and the hounds,” said Han.

“I should go home,” said Hux, and Han gave him an unimpressed look.

“We both know that’s not smart. I’ve got a bone to pick with you, son. It’s not the one you think. Ben’s bright. Do you know that?”

Hux laid back again, tried to suss out where this was going and came up empty, and decided to just let it spool out. “I know it.”

“School teacher thought Ben was the brightest kid she’d ever taught, and she’d been doing it forty years. You wouldn’t have been in his class.”

“No, sir.” Hux didn’t add that it was more than their difference in age; he’d been homeschooled.

“Well, he’s  _ bright _ . He was good at all of it. English, math. He can do trigonometry. Did you know that?”

Hux hadn’t. He shook his head silently.

“Leia wanted to send him to the state college. We saved up for it. He could’ve gone. He still could, we haven’t touched the money. He wanted to wait a year after high school and I backed him on it. I know now that I shouldn’t have. One year turned into two, you know how it is on a farm. And then he just lost all interest in it, and I mean  _ overnight _ . It was so odd. Here’s this bright kid. He loves it here but he does talk about going, you know, and then he just changes his mind? I always thought it was weird, anyway. Well now he’s fessed up.”

“I’m sorry,” Hux said quietly, and he was. Ben had never told him any of that, and Hux wouldn’t have made him go if he had. He was too selfish.

“Ben could have done near about anything and then he met you, and now he’s assaulted the neighbor and the sheriff less than five minutes apart from each other.” Han sighed heavily. “There’d be charges if it was anyone but Dameron.  _ Jail time _ . I don’t expect your dad will try that, but I’d appreciate you correcting me if I’m wrong.”

Hux shook his head. The last thing Brendol would do was file a police report, and not just because he’d been the one waving the gun.

“Leia and I got a chance to talk after he went to his room. Unwillingly, mind you, I imagine he’s still sulking if he’s not asleep, but at least he’s done throwing fists for now. She wants to send him up to his uncle and after being so wrong about the schooling I’m taking her side on this one.”

Hux said nothing. He looked at the ceiling. It was a popcorn ceiling, white but pebbled, and the electric lamp cast strange shadows.

“I guess you know what I want from you,” Han prompted.

“Yes, sir.”

“Leia says we can’t make you go back home when your dad pointed a gun at you on our lawn. I know you’re handy in the field. If you want a job here, it’s yours, but if you have the means,” (and Han’s voice betrayed exactly how likely he thought that was) “it’d be smarter to get somewhere the old man won’t lay eyes on you. That’s just my feeling on it.” Han turned the page in his book, and Hux knew that was the end of the conversation.


	7. Chapter 7

The next morning, Hux took his coffee in oddly companionable silence with Leia on the back porch. She made a strong cup, and he felt like the lights were coming back on inside after a tumultuous storm-driven power outage. The breeze had a chill to it this morning. Summer had heaved, bowed its back up, and died in its marital bed the day before. All its bright colors were wearing off the world. What lay beneath was gray and shabby, like a rat’s hide.

Han had been speaking with Ben just inside the house, and a shout echoed out now. “You can’t do that!” Hux wondered if Ben’s throat was getting sore. Ben appeared, looking sallow and furious. He didn’t try to sass Leia like he did Han, and perhaps as a reward she took her leave of them.

Ben came to stand next to Hux at the porch railing, and Hux passed him his coffee cup wordlessly. Ben drank and handed it back, cupping his hand over Hux’s unbroken one when Hux moved to take it. Hux didn’t meet his face. He stared down at the coffee mug -- speckled blue clay like a robin’s egg. This time the eye was sane, black-inside-blue, but his own face reflected up in it looked less so.

“They can’t send me away,” Ben said.

“They can turn you out, which is as good as,” Hux told him.

“They wouldn’t.”

_You’re right. That’s why Han put this on me_. “Don’t be headstrong. You’ll make a bad situation worse.”

Ben gaped at him, wounded. Betrayed. He shifted an inch closer, putting his huge body into Hux’s space, an intimidation tactic whether he realized it consciously or not. “You don’t mean that.” And Hux really, really didn’t. Ben could read it in him like always, even just from looking at his profile, and it only fortified Ben’s resolve. “We’ll run away.”

The idea seemed less ludicrous than before, even to the pragmatic side of Hux. If he could get away with everything he’d already done -- _and we couldn’t even cut a throat without making a mess of it, but it still worked out_ \-- he thought he and Ben could disappear into the vast roadways beyond their farms. “It takes money,” Hux murmured quietly, sure that Han and Leia hadn’t gone away too far.

“You’d have money if Maratelle sold her land.”

The words hit just as hard as his mother’s final slap had. Hux pulled his hand, still wrapped around his coffee cup, out of Ben’s. Hux wondered for the first time if Maratelle might have had some hidden away. It would have been a good idea, with a husband like Brendol. The $200 in a box had been as much a lie as all the rest that Brendol had told Dameron; Brendol Hux seldom had $20 cash to his name, and when he needed more paper bills he got them through shortie loans from the bank in town. Hux knew that after Han had offered the harvester for free this summer Brendol had used the $20 (kept in his pocket and not on the dresser) to purchase the means of making cement for the pipe, and a patch for the part of the roof that leaked, and drank the rest. But maybe there was something. Cash in the bottom of the sugar bowl, or the heel of her shoe _don’t think about her shoes her canvas shoes_. Rathole money. But he couldn’t search for it from here, and Ben couldn’t come with him. Hux wouldn’t let that happen. “There’s no use in talking about it, so don’t.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Ben finally asked.

Hux raised his chin and lowered it just barely, more of a twitch than a nod.

“He won’t get you too. You’re never going back.”

Tears pricked in Hux’s eyes and he knew they wouldn’t condemn him, so he let them fall. His hands were shaking, the coffee in his cup rippling like the black surface of a fetid pond. What horrors beneath? If only Ben knew. “I’m out of reds,” Hux said.

Apology stole over Ben’s face. “My parents don’t smoke.”

Hux bit his lip. “It’s okay.”

“No,” said Ben, just as Hux had known he would. “No, I’ll go up to the gas station.”

Hux gave him a look that meant _I’m very sorry, but would you please?_

Ben turned, and Hux stopped him with a hand on his arm. He squeezed the muscle, trying to memorize the feeling of Ben solid under his touch. “Give me a kiss,” Hux heard himself say. _For luck, if such a thing exists. And just in case._ It was strange to be kissed in the open. It made his pulse race like a teenager’s. Ben must have felt the same. He deepened it, licking into Hux’s mouth and sucking gently on his lower lip before they parted.

Hux heard Han accosting Ben at the door and the ensuing terse conversation, and then he felt Han’s eyes on him through the glass window in the back door until Ben’s car started and drove away, making sure Hux didn’t break for it too. Once Han was satisfied and moved on, Hux took one last drink of his coffee with a grimace -- it had gone all acid-and-oil once the heat leached out -- set the mug on the railing, and set off across the backyard toward the fields. Toward home.

He couldn’t see Brendol anywhere as he approached the house, which was worse somehow than if he had been tending the garden or pumping water or even standing in front of the door holding their old woodaxe. Inside the house, Hux gingerly poured out the sugar, salt, and flour tins and sifted through the mess with his good hand. Even trying not to use it, his injured hand was beginning to throb. He had the urge to cough and swallowed down the tickle in his throat, in case Brendol lay in the next room. He tore the cushions from the couch and got down flat on the floor to look under it just like Poe had done. He found nothing but rat droppings.

Hux went to the bedroom, walking slowly then, close to the wall to avoid creaking a board with his weight. He fully expected to come to the door and find Brendol sitting in bed facing him, but there was no one there. He searched the drawers in the dresser, leaving them askew, and tore Maratelle’s clothes from the closet to turn out every pocket. Each time there was nothing, but with each successive nothing he became more sure of an eventual something. There were two hat boxes on the top shelf, her church hats. The front box she used more often. It was her white hat, the fabric nearly translucent. Something like that wouldn’t hide a cent. Hux pushed the box aside without opening it, and it was heavier than he expected but there was no time to dwell on it. He pulled the second box out from behind it. In the second hat, black for funerals and used only then, Hux found two ten dollar bills folded into the satin inner band.

Twenty dollars wasn’t enough, but it was a start. It was a fill-up when the tank ran empty, and a couple of diner coffees and a meal that Ben could have most of, and a motel stay if they found somewhere cheap. They’d have to get two rooms.

The porch creaked outside, and then the screen door slammed and Brendol took two of his heavy steps inside and then noticed his kitchen was dusted with white, the tins overturned on the counter, and stopped. Hux’s hand went cold, unfeeling of the cash it held anymore. He supposed that Leia had put the revolver somewhere yesterday, but he hadn’t gone looking for it before coming this way. He was unarmed, and if Brendol was too that wouldn’t last long. He was closer to the kitchen.

“Got a chicken for supper, boy,” Brendol called out. Hux heard the muffled thud that must be his father laying the chicken’s body on the table. And given that there was a chicken for supper, Brendol would be holding the axe after all. No need to stop off at the knife block.

Hux tucked the twenty dollars into his pocket and crossed to the window, pulling it up. It took both hands and he groaned in pain. The window creaked in the frame and Brendol was running now to the bedroom. Hux squeezed through it and out into the air, slipping away just as Brendol’s horribly bruised face, purple and swollen like a dead thing, appeared behind him with a hand stretched out, grabbing for the collar of his shirt like a copper grabbing for a criminal on the nickelodeon screen. Hux felt his father’s fingertips brush the back of his neck and then he tumbled to his knees over the bushes beneath the windowsill, catching himself in the dirt. He saw white spots and cried out when the fall jostled his broken fingers.

At that very moment, Ben emerged behind the barn. He’d returned early. The drive up to the gas station was a cool fifteen minutes one way, but he’d fumbled in his glove box for spare change and found half a pack of reds there from an errand the both of them had run for Han last year. Ben couldn’t remember the errand, but he remembered sharing a soda outside the general store and he remembered the way the sun had looked in Hux’s hair. It was possible that cigarettes went stale, Ben wouldn’t know, but if they did then Hux would have to deal with it because Ben suddenly had the most awful feeling in his gut. He turned his car around on the road, running one tire off and kicking up pale dust, and when he got home he found Hux missing just as he’d somehow known he would.

Han was already out working. Leia left a note in the kitchen that she’d gone to lend their friend Lando down the road some baking soda. That was for the best, considering what Ben was going to do. It also made him feel acutely guilty, because the distrust his parents had displayed in keeping him separate from Hux the night before and in watching them this morning had only been a veneer after all, or Leia would be home. Leia had locked Brendol’s old revolver in her gun cabinet and taken the key, but Ben could improvise. He was angry, angry at Hux for going where he knew he’d gone but angrier at Brendol. On his way across the yard Ben stopped by the barn and grabbed the machete off its hook on the wall. He held it now in his hand as he walked over the filled-in well, passing over Elphis and Maratelle with her forever-grin without knowing it, and approached the front of the house.

Brendol roared, trying to follow his son out the window and finding his shoulders far too wide. Hux was crawling forward, trying to get his feet under him to stand. Once he ran, he was lost to Brendol. Brendol backed away and ran for the front door instead, bursting out of the house still with his bloodied axe in his hands and with dark spots of red on his white cotton work shirt. He looked disbelievingly at the sight in front of him. Solo, as tall and broad as ever, and this time the boy’s overly-expressive face held the sort of rage that doesn’t count the cost.

Ben blanched at the sight of Brendol -- and why not? He had the better part of the blood one of Tarkin’s harem contained in her little feathered body smeared on him. He could behead a chicken much better than he’d done, but he was...distracted. It’d been a hell of night after he trudged home alone and lay on the couch with a cool-soaked rag on his face. He’d woken up more than once and _thought_ he saw four rats at the corners of the coffee table, standing on their haunches like little sentinels and watching him. The day had been no easier. He’d fallen in the garden, and made a mess of the chicken, and missed Hux’s return. Now this.

“Come on, then,” said Brendol, and Ben charged.

The machete met the wooden axe-handle with a resounding thwack, but didn’t cleave it in two. Brendol twisted it aside, trying to budge Ben’s grip, but the boy held on, _damn him_. The axe was twisting the other way now, and then Brendol lost his grip and the axe was torn out of his hands. It dropped from the machete with a clunk. He grabbed for Ben’s throat, rushing him, and in the next instant there was nothing in his world but pain. It struck like lightning and then stayed, blurring his vision and sitting heavy in his head until sounds muddled and blurred too.

Hux came around the house, wincing, holding his arm in against his chest, and froze. The idea of the electric chair solidified, a more real threat than it had been since Poe Dameron came out in his cruiser with the star on the door and asked his cheerful questions with hard eyes, but not for Hux. There would always be worse, after all, and there was only one thing worse than Hux being fried in a white tile room for murder. Ben stood over Brendol, the machete in his grip slimed red. Would the case be so solid that he’d be on the direct pipeline to ride the lightning, or would Ben languish in a cell first? Would they shave his hair off? He’d hate that. He thought his ears stuck out too much when his hair was short. Ben saw Hux then, and the relief on his face was so immense that Hux felt his own expression crumple into tears.

Ben jogged over to him, dropping the machete at their feet, and pulled Hux into the most solid hug he’d ever gotten. Someone was saying, “Oh god, oh god,” and that was Ben’s vernacular, but Hux couldn’t be certain it wasn’t himself. Hux looked at his father’s body over Ben’s shoulder, and thought, _I’ve done it once. Maybe it gets easier, and no one’s coming after Brendol to make a deal_. But before he could even begin to consider where to put old Brendol, Brendol rolled over onto his back, groaning weakly and clutching the bloodied stump where his right wrist ought to be. His hand lay in the dirt behind him, palm up to the sky as if feeling for the scattered droplets at the start of a rain.

_Didn’t have the good grace to die on his own_ , thought Hux, and realized he’d said it out loud when Brendol turned pain-addled eyes up at him. Hux broke free from Ben and walked toward his father. “You,” he barked, sounding more like an army officer than a farmhand. “You listen to me. I’ll get your belt off for that arm and you can keep your miserable life, but I’m going and don’t you ever let me see you again. You send anyone after me or try and come yourself, I’ll tell _everything_.”

Brendol nodded, the motion jerky. His breaths were coming in short, uneven gasps. Hux knelt over him and stripped his father’s belt out of the loops without gentleness. He left it in the dust for Brendol to fumble with. Brendol’s blood was ink-black in the dirt as he hooked the belt around his arm and pulled it tight. The stump still dripped, but he would live. Hux turned his eyes away from it, seething. Killing his father now would not right the wrongs of the summer. He wasn’t sure he cared about that, but leaving a body behind would put Dameron on their tail for sure. _That_ , he cared about.

Hux led Ben back to the Organas’ yard, the ordered sanity of it, before he spoke again. “Ben, let’s go.”

“What?”

“Wherever you want, we’ve just got to go.” Hux turned and, realizing his own presumption, added. “I’ll split off if you won’t have me, once we hit a train station. We can head toward Omaha if that’s--”

Ben shook his head immediately. “Shut up. There’s half a pack of reds in the glove box.” To his own ears it sounded inane, especially with Brendol’s blood flecking his shirt. But Hux didn’t disagree, he simply got into the passenger side of Ben’s car and dug around until he located the cigs and lit one up. Hux’s lighter had been a gift, less ostentatious than the one Ben had truly wanted to give him, but it had to look like one he could afford for himself.

“The coast?” Ben asked, getting in the driver’s side. Hux exhaled blue smoke with his eyes closed, and Ben took it for agreement.

  
  


Five days later the sheriff’s car pulled into Brendol Hux’s drive again. Brendol waited sullenly while Poe went through his ritual: hitching his belt, taking the hat off and combing his hair and then replacing it. Dameron knew more than Brendol would have liked already, Brendol was sure. He’d had to shuffle down the lane all the way to Sloane’s place (and how it had left a sour taste in his mouth to ask that bitch for anything, but he would not approach Han) to ring Rose’s shop for a lift to the doctor. Couldn’t even crank the truck to start it with only one hand. Sloane had offered to pay without being asked, another insult that cut deep.

This time, Poe joined Brendol on the porch, sitting in Maratelle’s old rocker. He was far less cheerful than his previous visit, dispensing with the pretense of friendship. “Your boy’s gone?” He asked.

Brendol nodded.

“We might know more about the state of his health if you’d reported it when--”

“Stop fooling. They’re together and you know it.” Brendol snapped. Han and Leia had reported Ben missing that very day, the moment they noticed. He’d bet the other hand on it.

“You got any idea where he might run?” Poe asked.

_You never know which way a bitch will run,_ Brendol thought. He thought, also, that Poe was a lot less concerned with Armitage’s location than with Ben’s. Poe Dameron didn’t give a hoot in a high wind for the likes of Brendol Hux or his progeny, but he fawned over Leia. Poe and Leia delighted in sharing the wrong ideas about things with each other, as most communists did. “If I did, why would I tell you?”

“A little touchy there, Mr. Hux. I suppose I might be touchy, if it was my family scattered to two of the four corners of the earth. And you know what, if it was my son getting fit to scatter, and my neighbor, my _good_ neighbor’s son might be fixing to go with him, I might just have sent them a note that said, ‘Leia, Han. You know what? I think the kids just ran off. You want to tell your friend Poe Dameron to keep a look out for Ben’s car?’ But you didn’t do that, did you?”

“I was preoccupied.” Brendol raised his bandaged stump with a sneer. It was intolerable, being lectured like this.

“You get that here?” Poe asked.

“Had a little accident. Happens on farms, doesn’t it?”

“Before or after your son left?” Poe sounded as if he knew the answer, so Brendol didn’t bother with one.

“He hasn’t turned up anywhere yet, has he?”

“Can’t say he has.” Poe’s face was grim. “Can’t say it looks good for you, either, after Maratelle and after your and Hux’s...argument. If you remember, I was there.”

“Three days ago, someone held up a grocery and ethanol station at the Colorado border. Got 23 dollars from the clerk, menaced them with a crowbar,” said Brendol, and now Poe looked caught off guard. In truth, Brendol didn’t think his son had done it, but the report in the paper had said the bandit had red hair. Maybe it was enough of a lead to get Dameron off his property and to get Maratelle’s name out of the man’s mouth.

“You aren’t suggesting Ben and Hux robbed a store?”

“I’m suggesting that my son tore apart the house looking for something before they left. What do two runaways need other than cash? If he found any here, it wasn’t much.”

“Did Hux take a crowbar with him, that you know of?”

“Better ask Leia whether her boy kept one in his trunk.”

Poe shook his head. “Probably just a drifter looking for a quick payday. If you hear from Hux or Maratelle, you contact me. We’ve got them _both_ on the books as missing persons now.”

Brendol’s nostrils flared. Armitage wasn’t the Organas’ to report missing, but they’d gone ahead and done it. “I’ll do that, of course.” Dameron took his leave. Brendol stewed in his thoughts. He’d only brought up the robbery as a distraction, but now that the words were out he wanted to call them back. Suppose it _was_ Armitage that done it? If the Law caught up with him he might squeal just like he threatened to, and seeing Armitage die would be a cold comfort if Brendol held the same fate. He doubted his son was sly enough to rob some old woman working a gas station register, but murderers _learn_ slyness, don’t they? What’s theft after you’ve helped your father murder your mother? Hux had certainly already shown skill in menacing people -- just look at his stunt with Holdo and the pitchfork. And if Hux robbed one store he would rob another when the 23 dollars ran out, and eventually he would be caught, and it would all come out.

Brendol leaned forward on his elbows and put his face in his remaining hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The world's gettin a lot bigger for Hux and Ben. Bigger and better? Or worse? We shall see.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [this is the playlist I listen to while writing this story](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Ghy50uSB5VANhMrv6g4xI?si=jsosdAAaT06dhZzh6NKWUg)

Days went by. Brendol lost track of how many. He only knew they were rainy and cold. Outside chores stalled under the deluge, and the cows and the house didn’t fill his hours, even with the mess to clean up. He tried to read but the words of the Holy Book blurred in his eyes and were unknowable to him. He traded it out for a paperback Maratelle had left unfinished but it was no better. It was a murder book and certain words jumped off the page. Scream, guilt. Betrayal. Words like those. He sat more than one day on his porch, bundled up in his coat with the book open and unread on his lap, watching the rain drip off the porch roof.

It drummed like fingers on a door playfully asking for entry. Nights were worse. Brendol thought about Elphis and Maratelle beneath the soil of the yard and was more and more convinced that Maratelle was...not alive, but _aware_. Watching each new and horrific development in his life with grinning pleasure.

 _Was it worth it?_ She asked in the night, drumming her rainwater fingers on the windowpane. _Do you like how things have turned out?_

A week after Poe Dameron’s visit, Maratelle entered the house, though Brendol had not welcomed her in. Brendol lay in bed when he felt his wife’s touch cold on his face, tapping the bridge of his nose. Then his hairline, then his neck. Saying, _Got your attention yet, dear?_ Brendol surfaced from sleep with a shaky and angry laugh. He looked up. The ceiling was discolored and dripping. If the rain continued, the plaster would crack open and come apart. The leak was just above Brendol’s pillow. The rest of the ceiling looked fine.

“Have the worms and bugs gotten your tongue yet?” Brendol asked the room. “I hope they’ve blunted it at least.” He wished he hadn’t spoken to her the moment he did. At least the leaking roof was something to fix. He needed work so that he would stop thinking about his wife, unalive and aware in her dirt shrine. 

Brendol needed a project that would tire him enough that he would not lie awake in the night feeling Maratelle’s icy touch and wondering whether Armitage was out in the rain somewhere, drenched and burning up with fever, or perhaps already dead. Dead and walking, coming home. He wouldn’t do that alive, after all.

In Denver that same week, a redheaded man wearing a black cowboy hat walked into a pawnshop and bought a nickel-plated revolver for five dollars, money that had been handed to him under duress by a half-blind old woman. The next day, this same man walked into the lobby of a bank. He’d added a bandanna covering his face. The cowboy hat did not mask his unique hair color to the patrons of the bank on that day. He pointed his gun at the young and pretty teller named Kaydel and demanded all the money in her drawer. His mannerisms were stiff and authoritative, and she insisted to anyone who would listen that he had seemed almost military. By the next week, the papers were calling the redheaded bandit The General. Kaydel passed 200 dollars worth of grimy stacked bills to him.

As he left, The General was accosted by a stocky retired policeman named Rex. “You don’t want to do this, son,” he said.

“Stand down. I’ve got a friend outside. You just fall back against that post and stay put.”

Rex attempted another step forward and the bandit fired into the ceiling, making several people -- including Kaydel -- scream and crouch down with their hands over their heads. The General fled, and he had a friend after all, because someone was driving. Rex ran out of the building after him and watched the criminals flee together.

After that first shot was fired, The General never appeared alone again. It was odd -- the best place for his “friend” to be was just where he’d been in Denver, ready to peel off from the scene of the crime. Rex thought about it often as he sat at home, no family of his own to consume his time instead. It was _very_ odd. The General had seemed quite sharp to him, and such a lapse in judgement bothered Rex. Nevertheless, every subsequent stick-em-up was engineered by two men instead of one. The General and his dark behemoth of a friend.

  
  


Brendol had just finished sloughing the sweat and dirt off himself, using a rag and bucket of water he’d heated on the stove, when he wondered if Hux had found any money in the house after tearing it apart. If he had, he’d been low on funds at the state line. So perhaps he hadn’t. And that being the case, there might still be something around. Brendol had gone through his bottle of whiskey and needed another, for which he needed cash.

Brendol got up from the bed stark naked and started with the closet, the place he’d interrupted Hux’s thievery. Maratelle’s clothes Brendol had not bothered to put back on their hangers, he only bundled them onto the closet floor. The funeral hat Brendol had put back in its box. Hux had checked that one, of course. But the other hat box had still been closed when Brendol picked up the mess. He pulled out the funeral box now and reached for its twin. He hooked his finger under the box’s elastic band and dragged it forward, noting how heavy it was, as if there were a brick inside rather than a church hat. The box tipped off the shelf and came open, revealing the shreds of white fabric and the huge gray rat inside. The rat from the barn. Now, any rat looks mostly like any other, and the particular rat that had bitten Achelois had no distinguishing feature like a white patch of hair or a bitten ear, but Brendol knew nevertheless that this was that same rat. Just as he knew it was not in the closet by accident. Maratelle had condoned Hux’s search of her possessions, tender toward him even in cruel undeath, as mothers were wont to be. But Brendol, she punished.

The rat launched itself out of its disrupted home and bit deep into the meat of Brendol’s remaining palm, gouging it with its long white teeth. Brendol screamed and shook his arm, feeling the weight of the rat tear his flesh free as it hung on. The rat dropped to the floor, gave him a particularly venomous look, and scurried away under the dresser. It had been bigger than Brendol’s feet, with eyes like black marbles. It weighed six pounds at least. He heard the dry whush of its tail on the floorboards. Brendol sat down hard on the foot of the bed, holding his gashing hand to his chest in unconscious mimicry of his son after his tumble from the window, complete with his stump propped up against it, phantom hand trying to put pressure on the wound. Warm blood matted his chest hair. Half-mad with pain and horror, Brendol reflected that he was cursed now to mar his sleeping place with blood. His hand was on fire.

Someone said, “No more no more no more,” in a croaking voice. It sounded like a wearied old man, reduced to begging.

Once Brendol had run his hand under the cold tap and bundled it up in cloth, tying it with his teeth -- every movement exquisite pain, as the only hand he had to use was torn open -- he donned a pair of overalls and a coat to go out and check the pipe. He expected somehow to find the cement dislodged or eaten through, but it was just as it should be. Even six pound rats could not possibly get through a cement plug. There must be another exit from the tomb, because it was the same rat. Brendol knew it was.

That night, in his rain-damp bed with his blood drying on the floor and his hand throbbing in its soaked linens, Brendol heard the _skittering_. It came from everywhere. Within the walls and the ceiling -- the sound of running rats, and not just any rats.

 _The rats are hers_. Her loyal court, attending her sunken throne. They would flood out and overwhelm him, ripping him to pieces, and he would smell Maratelle’s decaying breath on his face as she laughed. But first, madness.

And it _was_ madness, Brendol decided. Moments later he realized it was not hearing rats at all, but sleet. Icy rain fell on the house. The wind was growing stronger, and the sleet battered the old building, sounding very much like rats, but Brendol knew better. He said aloud, “I know better, Maratelle.”

  
  


“You shouldn’t have done it,” Hux said, more to the mountains than to Ben. It was the world that did wrong first, Hux thought. Neither he nor Ben had chosen to be born into it.

“He grabbed you.”

“And that’s a death sentence, is it?” The man _had_ grabbed Hux, on the steps of the Grand Junction Agricultural Bank. They’d robbed the joint more efficiently than the one in Denver -- Hux supposed that Ben was a great deal more intimidating than himself, which made the tellers move faster -- but once they left the front doors a man had rushed Hux and took hold of his arm, wrenching it painfully. His broken fingers were still healing, and without medical aid. He had cried out. Ben shot the man in his chest. Whether a particularly passionate good Samaritan or a plainclothes cop, he had tried to keep hold of Hux after that, at which point Hux kicked him down the bank’s granite steps. If there was any chance the man would have survived his gunshot wound, there was no chance of scooping his brains back into his fractured skull.

“You’re awful high and mighty over it,” Ben scratched his nose and sniffed, looking away. “You didn’t have to kick him.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“You want to turn ourselves in?”

“No,” Hux said. He took a deep breath in and released it. “Forget it. How about that view?”

“‘S nice,” Ben allowed. They were looking out on the diminishing Rocky Mountain range from the second floor balcony of a hunting cabin. The fading light turned the juts of rock on the mountaintops orange, and the snow-shadows were a shocking shade of violet. If they weren’t in Utah yet they would be soon. Ben wasn’t willing to give up the conversation. “You think it was wrong of me.”

Hux tapped his foot, biting his lower lip and swinging his hips back to lean forward, folding under the atmospheric pressure of his anger and sadness. “I think it was wrong of me,” he decided.

Ben had just turned the situation around onto Hux in his irritation, reflecting Hux’s own foul mood back at him, but now he objected to the self-blame. “You only reacted--”

“No.” Hux stood back up straight. “No, I mean it was wrong of me not to leave you back in Kansas.”

“Hux,” Kylo was affronted. It could easily grow to fury.

“Your folks had money saved up to send you to college. You could have had anything you wanted in life and--”

“What I want is you,” Ben said, practically growling it out like a warning. His temper had gotten shorter of late. He was more contrarian.

“I’m not good for you. I wasn’t then and I’m not now,” Hux sighed.

“You’re the only good thing about me,” Ben disagreed. Hux scoffed and he continued, his tone still biting, “You are. You’re the only one I’m nice to.”

Hux met his gaze, frowning, and raised his eyebrows.

Ben softened his voice. “Usually. You’re the only one that I’m _usually_ nice to. If I hadn’t met you I think I would’ve just gotten worse and worse until everyone hated me. Including my parents. If they don’t now. Shit, I bet they will. How long do you think it’ll be til word of this reaches Kansas? Mom won’t understand.”

Hux thought of Leia pointing Brendol’s revolver at him on her lawn and wasn’t so sure. “They’ll assume it was me. Correctly,” he said, a faint smile on his face. Ben reached over and pulled him in. Hux resisted the urge to pull away. They were in the middle of nowhere. And it was nice to be held in a beautiful place, by a beautiful man. “Of the two of us, I’m the killer.”

“You saved him a few days of agony in a hospital bed.” Ben said into Hux’s hair before shifting to kiss the cold shell of his ear.

“That’s not what I meant,” Hux admitted.

“Hm?” Ben was working his way down from Hux’s ear, leaving open-mouthed kisses down his neck. He licked once above Hux’s collar, the swipe of his tongue hot and the saliva it left behind cooling quickly.

“When you said that Brendol wouldn’t get me too,” Hux began, and he felt Ben freeze behind him, going stiff-jointed like a statue instead of the living man that had just been cuddling him.

“You don’t have to,” Ben said quietly.

But there was no holding it back now. “ _I killed her just as much as he did_. I was afraid of losing you. Ben, I--”

Ben shushed him gently, seeming to melt to life again. “It’s over.”

“It’s not.” Hux was crying, and he wiped at his face with one wrist angrily, sniffing. “All of this is my fault. He wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t--” He broke off. For a moment it seemed the words would stick in his throat and choke him. They sounded thick when they emerged. “--held her down for him. _God_ , Ben, she _suffered_. It wasn’t even quick.”

“I know.”

“What?” Hux turned to look at Ben, completely taken aback.

Ben seemed embarrassed. “I mean, I didn’t know all that, but I did...know.” Like he always did.

“The night you didn’t ask?”

Ben nodded.

“If you want me to leave--”

“For someone so sharp you’re awful dumb.” Ben’s hand splayed over Hux’s stomach, holding him tight against Ben’s body behind his.

“I ruined you,” Hux said, laughing miserably even as he said it.

“You’re not that persuasive.” Ben returned to kissing at his neck. “Now that you fessed up about your dead mom, think you can finish?”

“ _Ben!_ ”

“I’m just curious. I’d like to try.”

It turned out that Hux could. After, laying together on the cabin’s old bed -- Hux congratulated himself on having the foresight to change the sheets out with ones from the cabin’s tiny linen closet upon their arrival -- Ben said, “I’d do it again.”

Hux shook his head, still breathing hard, “Give me a minute.”

“No, I mean… Well, that too.” Ben turned toward him. “I mean I’d shoot someone again. Anyone who tries to get between us.” Hux said nothing, but he did put a hand on Ben’s thigh, rubbing his thumb in a circle. They settled into a pleasant restful state, and Hux wondered at the immense weight of love. It wasn’t enough to save anyone, but it was sure as hell enough to damn them.

The sun set on them for the night after the second round Ben had inadvertently suggested, and they both slept for a time. Hux woke in the night, not from needing the privy or from thirst but from the sensation of being watched.

There was a huge gray rat on the stool beside the bed, it’s naked tail curled around its body. Hux looked at the creature, accepting its presence at once. It was as natural as the shadowy paneled wall behind it. He reached his hand out, palm up, toward the rat. It twitched its whiskers and came forward on its little feet to sniff at him. The rat licked his fingertips. Even a bare month prior such a thing would have repulsed Hux beyond words, but after the evening’s conversation with Ben the vermin was welcome.

“Hey, Mum,” Hux whispered at it.

The rat licked his fingertips again and sneezed, then sat up to clean its face, its black eyes looking at him blankly. Hux felt tears start to form at the corners of his eyes. He lifted his head from the mattress and the little beast scuttled off, gone in a flash.

Ben rolled over and mumbled something, reaching for Hux in the gray-dark of the room. His muscled arm snaked around Hux’s middle and pulled him closer.

“I’m sorry. Go back to sleep,” Hux murmured to him, and then took his own advice.


	9. Chapter 9

The house was chilly as a tomb. The flesh around the bite on Brendol’s palm had gone a bloodless grayish-white, and the rest of the hand was a startling red, swollen twice its size. He needed to wrap it up tight, but there was no way to get a wrapping totally flush using his teeth to pull it. Pressure anywhere on the hand except for the very tip of his little finger was excruciating. It pulsed, warm. Warm like a woolen glove with a rat burrowing around inside.

He was feverish. He needed a doctor again, but the ice was still coming down, making even the walk to the Organas’ treacherous. Who ever heard of so much sleet and October just started? Brendol sat in the kitchen in his freezing home, shivering but pouring with sweat, and unable to build a fire in the stove. He had tried and failed, desperate tears freezing on his face. He was not on the telephone exchange and had no hand fit to crank a generator with if he were. He sat alone on the farm he had killed for, with no means of reaching help. His wrist was going red too, infection spreading. He thought of getting elastics and banding off his hand, killing it to save himself, but the act of opening the drawer he needed was too much.

Brendol was going to die from the bite, and resigned himself to it. He found a bottle of morphine pills in the bathroom, the ones Maratelle had been prescribed for her painful monthly cycles. He’d held it between his stump and his body and then dropped it on the counter to open it, painstakingly picking three pills to swallow out of the shattered brown glass with his aching hand. He saved the rest. If it got too bad he’d take them all at once, but not yet. Brendol wanted to live. He feared death as all living things do. He hoped against his better judgement that his neighbors might come calling, having not seen him outside. Perhaps even Holdo would visit once more to scream profanity at him, and thus would be his salvation.

Most of all he hoped Armitage would come home. The boy had looked at him so coldly before he left, but Brendol knew that if his son returned now he would take pity on his old man and nurse him back to health. Armitage was weak in the heart. He wouldn’t sit by and watch his father suffer. But it was not Armitage who came.

It was Maratelle.

At first it was only that the door-latch moved. In the storm of the night Brendol could only see the silhouette of the woman outside through the screen door. The latch trembled, as though she could not find the strength to pull it up completely and free the door. Just when Brendol was ready to dismiss it entirely as a fevered delusion, the latch jumped up with a small click and the door flew open. His wife was on the porch. Her face was slack with decay, her grin wider than ever and skewed to one side. It was a knowing grin, for the dead understand what the living do not.

Her gait was horrible and lurching, as divorced from walking as something could be. She ambled inside, surrounded by her loyal court. Rats scurried around her tattered dress and one rode on her shoulder -- the big one, the one from the barn, the one from the closet. The rats paused when she did, looking up at her like faithful, loving pets. When they looked at Brendol it was with hate. Her head rolled on her cut throat, once all the way back so that the dead cord of her neck stood out in horrid relief under the kerosene light, and then it snapped back up.

She turned her eyes on Brendol. She should not still have eyes, Brendol thought, but they were there and unblemished: pale green. The harlot’s eyes. They were conspiring together even now and Armitage’s dead mother had somehow lent Maratelle her eyes when Maratelle’s own brown ones dried up.

“Leave me alone,” Brendol hissed at her. “You’re in the well and you can’t get out. You’re not real.”

But she was real enough to cast a shadow. And real enough to smell. The scent of her decay was strong enough to make his eyes water. She made a gurgling laugh that issued more from her open throat than her hanging jaw. What little remained of her rat-bitten tongue was black, the tongue that she used to stick in Brendol’s mouth during nighttime throes of passion. Maratelle brought up one nearly-skeletal hand and snapped her fingers, a bone-click. The stove roared to life like the belly of a dragon, its heat immense though there was no fuel within. Her rats, too, were real. Brendol could feel their whiskers on his bare ankles as they sniffed him, and their bodies wriggling beside him and under his raised knees.

Maratelle leaned over him and her face sagged forward, loose from her skull in several places. He feared the remaining threads would snap free and it would come down into his lap like a mask. Brendol told himself to die, but his traitorous heart pounded on. Maratelle’s bones groaned and creaked like the icy branches of the trees outside. She began to whisper, mercifully without moving her face, whispering directly into his mind in a voice that was both her own and the harlot’s, telling him secrets that only the dead know.

Brendol begged her to stop, to see reason. He promised her anything, he promised to kill himself, but the dead do not stop. She told him their son was dead, a lie and a prophecy.

  
  


It was the sweetest poison to fight so dearly to keep a love that could never be legitimized. They took 800 dollars from a bank in Las Vegas after patrolling the city the day before, walking under the lights together. Ben fired two shots into the thigh of a security guard who didn’t drop to the floor fast enough. The guard survived, telling papers that in itself was a miracle: “I was in a pool of my own blood an inch deep ‘fore help came.” He would lose the leg soon after, but was remarkably charitable about that, when years later he had the good fortune of meeting Leia Organa.

“I never should have tried anything,” He told her over sodas at his kitchen table. She followed her son’s trail later, speaking with people who came into contact with Ben that year. “I could see it in his eyes that he meant business. They both had their hats low and bandanas high but I could see their eyes. I should have known neither would stop unless they were shot down. I was young, myself. I’m older now. Your son never got that chance. I’m real sorry, ma’am.”

After that job, they stole a better car too. A nondescript Ford, which Leia thought was Hux’s idea. Ben was smart, but the boy had always liked cars. She could picture him looking at the vehicles lining the streets of Las Vegas like a child walking into a toy shop, and the thought brought her to tears. That car was the beginning of their true notoriety, the car and what came after. They’d left a note on their abandoned ride with its piebald tires in place of the Ford, the words beautifully spaced-out on the back of a diner receipt in Ben’s neat handwriting.

_Sorry, we’re in a scrape. -The General and Kylo Ren_

It was likely that Ben had only wanted to avoid using his own name, but of such things legends are born. If they’d gotten out of Vegas then they might have passed into obscurity, but they hung around another night. Their luck was running out like sand between their fingertips. It was Hux’s hair that did them in, paired with Ben’s frame.

They stopped in for drinks at a worn-down bar at the very edge of the city instead of going straight to the train station they had decided on. It was hubris, Hux thought later when he lay in a barren room with a bullet wound darkening his shirt. They had felt like gods. The bartender looked at the pair of them, Hux whip-thin and ginger and Ben thick enough to lift the front end of a car, and sussed out their identities right away. His daughter had been in the bank they robbed that very morning, and came home traumatized. Rather than ring the police, the man decided to opt for a citizen’s arrest. He took a rusty pistol out from under his counter and pointed it across the bar at Ben.

Ben raised his hands up and spoke softly. “Don’t do this, we’ll pay up and go.”

The bartender pulled the trigger, but there was only a dry click. Hux took the gun out of his hand and opened the cylinder.

“Your bullets have been in here so long they’re green,” Hux said, and set the gun down on the counter. It was his mistake. He told Ben as much later -- green or not, he should have put those bullets in his pocket before he turned his back.

They left, Ben already reaching for Hux’s hand as the door closed. The bartender snatched up his gun and pulled the trigger again. He’d been aiming for Ben, but hit Hux. The bullet went through his left shoulder and he fell forward, screaming. Ben caught him and they fled to their stolen car. The bartender aimed again, trying to shoot Ben through the window of the vehicle, and his gun blew up in his hand, taking most of his head with it. Leia never was sorry about that, even after meeting the impressionable daughter whose youthful innocence he’d been avenging.

They hit the road headed west toward the train station. With Hux bleeding all over the seat and twisting his body in pain, Ben drove too fast. They ran over a pothole hard enough to bust one of the tires and skidded to a stop. Ben pulled Hux from the car and carried him the rest of the way, stopping off at a derelict house just before the city streets gave way to the gravel of the train station’s property.

The house went up in flames that night and the Las Vegas Fire Department could not control the blaze -- the house was unattached to the others and condemned anyway, and so they let it burn down under their watchful eyes. Inside they found two charred corpses, faces and hair singed up to charcoal. The fire had started right where they laid their heads, but one had his skull popped open with the nickel-plated pistol still in his blackened hand, and the other had a shoulder wound. Open and shut case. The General and Kylo Ren went out in a blaze of glory just as their fame had first bloomed.

The train left the station that night with every seat filled, and those seated around the redhead in car three sometimes heard him groan when the train car lurched. His brooding seatmate saw him clasp a hand over his shoulder, too, and wanted very badly to hold him. It had been nasty work, what he’d done to the two vagrants in the house. Barely an hour later, however, Ben knew he could live with it. In fact, when he looked at Hux’s face next to his, a bit pale and a bit drawn from pain but _alive_ , he knew he could live with much more. So much more.

The next morning’s Nevada headlines read THE GENERAL AND KYLO REN: MURDEROUS BANDITS DEAD IN CITY OF SIN!

  
  


There was hammering at the door. Brendol thought it was Armitage at first, Armitage pale and bloodless, come home to rejoin his mum. It was Poe Dameron. Brendol tried to tell him about Maratelle, and about her whispers. That Armitage was shot in Las Vegas, and Poe ought to do something about it.

“It was them all right,” Poe nodded, dragging Brendol out to his car with him. “You were right about the Colorado robbery. Jesus, what did this to you?”

“Rat.” Brendol looked blearily around him and saw that Tarkin and the chickens were frozen to the ground. The cows were lowing weakly. He didn’t know when he’d last fed them.

“You ought to be grateful to Maratelle, I’d never be out here if not for her.” Poe grunted, hoisting Brendol into the passenger seat just beyond its gleaming yellow star.

“Dead.”

“She’s dead, yes sir. We’ll talk about her, but I’m taking you to the hospital right now.”

Brendol’s infection was treated, and his remaining hand was saved, though his grip would never be as strong as it once was. When Poe came in to visit, Brendol expected him to slap a cuff on an ankle (for neither wrist was a viable option) and tell him stiffly that he was under arrest for the murder of his wife.

Instead, Poe sat with pity on his face and said, “I guess you saw it in my eyes, huh?”

Brendol was still sick, but recovered enough to be cautious. “What?”

“What I came by to tell you. You don’t remember?”

“Armitage?”

“No, but we’ll find him. I promise you. It was Maratelle I came about. Bad news. The worst. I’m sorry, Mr. Hux. A family on the outskirts of Kansas City saw two coyotes fighting over something out in the field behind their yard. Turned out to be a body. Skeletal. Patent leather pumps, faded brown hair. The sun’ll do that. If she took her good jewelry and 180 dollars cash, that explains everything, don’t you think?”

Brendol nodded numbly. Robbed on the road. It could happen to anyone. On the road or in a bank, it could happen. It did happen. The urge to confess came on him then, prompted by the idea that doing so would end the nightmare. Even if the Law didn’t see straight through Brendol Hux, Maratelle did. Maratelle and the harlot and the _rats_. He bit his lip to stifle himself until Poe left, and then he started to laugh.

He laughed so hard it turned to sobbing, and the nurse gave him an extra painkiller. Taking pity on a grieving father and husband. The serendipitous appearance of a female corpse was funny enough, but what really got Brendol started was the shoes. Hux had told Poe that Maratelle took her _canvas_ shoes, and Poe Dameron up and forgot. The idiot never remembered.

Achelois was the last surviving cow when Brendol returned. The two of them did not live on the farm undisturbed for long when Poe returned again, even more stooped than before and with purple shadows under his eyes. Brendol knew he’d be coming back, of course, with the news of Armitage’s passing. Maratelle told him.

“No more,” Brendol said. “Go away.”

Poe’s face crumpled. There were tear tracks on his cheeks already: he’d been by the Organas’ first. Brendol had heard Leia’s scream echo over the barren fields. “I’m sorry,” Poe said.

The bodies waited at the town morgue. Brendol found that Leia and Han had arranged payment for both burials. Hux had a nicer coffin than Brendol could have ever hoped to afford. A good thing; the funerals were closed-casket. The whole town and then some showed out for Ben’s, including his uncle from Omaha and the uncle’s friend. The weeping in the church was loud enough to hear twenty feet from the door. The attendance at Hux’s eulogy was much lower. The pastor saw two: Brendol in the front row and Leia in the very back, both silent. There were actually three, or maybe four. Maratelle with the harlot’s eyes was there, whispering. Brendol almost expected Hux to walk through the doors and sit on his other side. Would he be charred and smoking? But he didn’t. It nagged at Brendol, but he pushed the thoughts away. Best not to look a gift horse in the mouth. One ghost was enough. Ben and Hux were both buried in the local cemetery, in neighboring plots also purchased with Leia’s money.

The day after the burials, a huge blizzard roared out of the Rockies and covered Kansas in a fresh blanket of snow -- over a foot of it. Gale-force winds tore across the plains, mourning louder than the congregation had. Just as the pendulum of the summer had swung far into suffocating heat and stillness, winter brought desolate cold and howling storms which did not break until December 25th.

In Los Angeles, California, two men walked together on the beach for the first time in their lives. Not hand in hand -- not in broad daylight. The weather was brisk for it, but they did kick off their shoes and put their feet in the water. The wind ruffled their hair; one of them ginger and the other brunette.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more after this!


	10. Chapter 10

On Christmas morning, which Brendol spent sipping whiskey in his cold sitting room with his remaining cow for company, he considered what to do with the 100 acres. Upon the official death of Maratelle Hux, they belonged to him. He needed money -- he had none to repair the damage the winter storms had done to the farm -- but he would do anything to keep the land out of the Republic Goods company’s hands, especially after the lengths he’d gone to already. So, he swallowed his pride and went to visit Han Solo.

He tied a washrag to a stick and waved it as he came up their drive. It was more gray than white, but it would have to do. The man who answered the Organas’ door had fared better than Brendol, but the year had still taken its toll. That was obvious. He had lost weight, and his face was deeply lined. His shirt was also wrinkled, as though he hadn’t changed from the one he slept in.

“Don’t hit me,” said Brendol when Han balled his fists up. “Hear me out.”

“I won’t hit a man with only one hand, and barely that. But keep it short,” Han said, glowering out into the cold and white expanse of the day. “And we’re talking out here.”

“That suits me fine,” said Brendol. He had lost weight too, looking more like his son than he ever had, and he shivered now in the cold, but it also felt good on his stump, and on the invisible hand below it. “I want to sell you my 100 acres, Han. It’s good land, and I’ll sell cheap.”

Han’s eyes glinted meanly. “Fallen on hard times, haven’t you? Rose Tico says half your house and half your barn’s caved in, and you’ve got a cow living with you.”

Brendol had seen Rose Tico’s truck go by with deliveries. _Gossiping bitch_. He gritted his teeth, and named a price so low that Han’s eyebrows shot up. It was then that Brendol noticed a smell wafting out of the neat and orderly Organa house that simply did not belong: burnt food. While Leia wasn’t the chef that Ben was, she wasn’t one to ruin a dish. Brendol dismissed the thought and refocused. He needed cash. “I figure it’s only fitting to sell those acres so cheap, since they cost me so dear.”

“That’s pennies on the dollar,” said Han. “Maratelle would roll in her grave. My condolences, by the way.”

_Oh, she’s done more than just roll in it, her and the harlot both_ , thought Brendol. He said, “Take the offer, Han. It’s good land.”

“No,” Han smiled thinly. Brendol stared at him, shocked, and Han nodded as if Brendol had answered a question. “You think you know what you’ve done to me, but you don’t. Leia’s left me. She’s gone to stay with her brother. At least he’ll still talk to me. She says she may be back, but I don’t think so. So that puts you and me in a similar spot, doesn’t it? We’re two men who started the year with wives and are ending it without them. We started the year with living sons and are ending it with dead ones. The only difference I can see is I haven’t lost half my house and one and a half hands. There’s that.”

“Leia? Why--”

“Use your head,” Han snapped. “She blames me. She blames herself too, I’m sure. Omaha was her idea and Ben didn’t take kindly to it, but whatever blame she puts on me I deserve it. I told your boy to try and help us send him off, and I shouldn’t have left that between the two of them. Ben could be sitting on the floor in the living room right now, _alive_ . Drinking coffee and opening a box. Instead he’s in one, down in the frozen ground. Hell, your boy could be here too. I’d rather have the both of them in front of the fireplace with the dogs. Bright kids, both of them. But they’re _not_ here.” Han shook his head and sniffed. “One thing I know for sure, if I took you up on that offer I’d regret it. That land is cursed. You want to sell it, sell it to the bank.”

“They’ll turn around and sell it to Republic Goods!” Brendol protested.

“Tough titty,” said Han, and closed the door in his face.

Brendol returned to the farm. Achelois was no longer in the house. She was in the yard, collapsed over broken legs. She had bolted. Brendol fetched his new pistol -- the nickel plated one discovered in Las Vegas, Leia and Han had refused it -- and put Achelois out of her misery. He knew what had frightened her.

It was rats, of course. They clustered on every surface in the house, looking at Brendol with their beady eyes.

“Go on back and tell her to leave me alone,” Brendol said. “For God’s sake tell her to leave me be. It’s enough.” The rats only sat there, looking at him in confusion, for it was plain the house was theirs.

Brendol turned and walked through the snow-encrusted land that Han would not buy until he came to the cursed place where he’d brought Armitage into being. There was a bottle of whisky on the counter in the little house’s kitchen, chilled from the cold, and Brendol poured himself a glass. It was Ben’s, he knew. Nicer stuff than Brendol ever bought himself.

_Good lad_ , he thought.

He stayed there, drinking the bottle down. Day and night coalesced into a meaningless and gray absence of time. It didn’t take long for the rats to find him in the harlot’s bedroom, laying upon the disused sheets where he knew his son had spat in the face of God. He had plugged the pipe but the rats still escaped. He had filled in the well, but Maratelle still walked the snowy land outside the window with the tatters of her dress whipped up by the wind, and sometimes her rotting frame seemed taller and paler than it should be.

Wherever Armitage had gone after The General perished in Las Vegas, it wasn’t home. He, at least, did not return to torment Brendol. The sharp teeth of the rats were enough.

The body of Brendol Hux was found by Sheriff Poe Dameron after Han Solo used the exchange wire to order a wellness check. Poe later told him, “I’ve never seen anything like that, and I never want to again. He bit himself all over. Tore out his wrists. _Fuck_.” Han sighed, shook his head, and offered Poe two fingers of Leia’s favorite gin in response.

  
  


“Hey. Hey c’mon, I know you’re awake.”

Hux smiled when he felt Ben’s hand roam down his chest and stomach and dip below the loose waistband of his pajama bottoms. Ben’s other arm was pinned below Hux’s head, but he twisted his hand up to try and pet Hux’s hair.

“Mm, no. I’m dead asleep,” Hux whispered.

“Let me make love to you.”

The sound of the ocean’s waves came in through the window. They had work in the morning. They’d both been able to find employment in construction, Ben out on the sites and Hux in the office. It wasn’t so very strange, then, to rent together.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Hux sat up.

“No such thing.”

“Come on.”

Hux led Ben, the both of them still in their nightclothes, down the winding path through scrubby trees and sandy soil to the beach. He never tired of walking along the sea with Ben. And if it served as a sort of foreplay that would wind Ben up and make him desperate before their eventual coupling, all the better. It was nights like these where they’d return and Ben would shove Hux up against the wall as he kicked the door shut.

In just a few minutes, Hux would tire of teasing him and he’d let Ben walk them back home and _make love_ to him. Ben’s fingers were just as dexterous as they’d always been, though Hux himself sometimes had a pain in his left knee now. _Getting old_. Not to mention the shoulder. He couldn’t lift that arm above his head, but he didn’t need to with Ben around. Ben was already trying to rub his arm against Hux’s as they walked. If they were home he’d be trying for a handful of Hux’s ass. Hux would let him, probably. Just down to the next pier, then they’d walk back and crawl into bed and Ben could open Hux up and enter him, stretching almost to the point of pain, and rutting toward the electric end. Ben would finish with a grunt and one final, deep thrust, his face buried in Hux’s neck. Choked cries were reserved for when their positions were switched, and Hux was set on being fucked tonight, being full and sheltered and laid bare and open. By the time they were done they’d have precious little time left to sleep and they’d be just as likely to spend it simply holding each other. Ben weathered it better, but Hux would be dozing off at his desk. There was beauty in that too.

“What are you thinking?” Ben asked, sounding very much like he already knew. The beach was deserted, the distant homes shadowed.

Hux pulled Ben to him and kissed him in the full dark, and it felt like freedom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shortie but it didn't take more to wrap things up like I wanted. In an alternate timeline Leia and Han had one (1) conversation with Ben and Hux telling them they were both welcome to stay and Christmas morning played out like Han mentions. They just wanted better for their kiddo but the heart wants what it wants. Two construction workers probably couldn't afford a beachside shack even in amorphous 1900-1975 Stephen Gammell-land but it's fiction so we'll pretend.

**Author's Note:**

> [Kylux Spotify Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6YRMYaT5fte0cPWH5UVGW5?si=J3LTK6tkRyqlKb_taM7eHg)
> 
> [this is the playlist I listen to while writing this story](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Ghy50uSB5VANhMrv6g4xI?si=jsosdAAaT06dhZzh6NKWUg)


End file.
